Printer's Devil Court (Kindle Single)

  PRINTER’S DEVIL COURT

  by

  SUSAN HILL

  Table of Contents

  LETTER

  THE BOOK

  PART ONE

  PART TWO — 1

  PART TWO — 2

  PART TWO — 3

  PART TWO — 4

  PART THREE — 1

  PART THREE — 2

  POSTSCRIPT

  HUGH'S FINAL PAGES

  Temple, Farley and Freeman, Solicitors

  2 Delvers Court

  St James’s

  London SW1

  Dear Sir

  The enclosed item has been sent on to me by Messrs Geo Rickwell, Antiquarian Booksellers, with the instruction that it be passed on to the beneficiaries of the estate of the late Dr Hugh Meredith. As you know, the library in which it was found was entrusted for sale to Messrs Rickwell. Of a few items not included in the sale, mainly for reasons of poor physical condition, the enclosed was deemed to have no commercial value. I am therefore sending it to you to deal with in any way you see fit. I would be grateful for acknowledgement of its receipt in due course.

  Yours etc

  The book in question measures some eight inches square and the sheets, of a pleasing cream paper, had been folded and hand-sewn together with heavy card backing — a neat and careful piece of amateur bookbinding. Apparently this, together with botanical illustration and embroidery, was one of the soothing hobbies taken up by Dr Meredith in old age, when he had long ceased to practise medicine, not only because of his advancing years, the family story has it, but because he suffered from sort of intermittent nervous condition.

  The book has no title on the cover or the spine but on the first page is written

  The Wrong Life

  Hugh Meredith M D

  THE BOOK

  PART ONE

  In my first year as a junior doctor I moved into lodgings in a small court close by Fleet Street, an area which could not at the time have changed greatly since the days of Dickens.

  The court was small and the tall, narrow, grimy houses faced into a dismal yard, at one end of which a passageway led into the main thoroughfare. At the other end, a similar snicket led to the graveyard and thence to the church of St Luke-by-the-Gate. The church was pressed in on either side by two warehouse buildings, and most of the graveyard was ancient and no longer in use. Old stones leaned this way and that, monuments and tombs were greened and yellowed over with moss and lichen. One or two trees struggled upwards to find what little light they could, and at their bases, more gravestones, sunken flat to the earth, were almost entirely obscured by weeds, ivy and rank grasses. In between was a mulch of dead leaves. I sometimes took a short cut through the churchyard on my way — often late — to the hospital. Once, when my sister was visiting me and I took her that way, she said that she could not understand why I was not frightened out of my wits when walking.

  “Frightened of what?”

  “Ghosts… the dead.”

  “As to ghosts, my dear Clara, I do not believe in them for a moment and dead bodies I see in the hospital every day so why would either of those things frighten me? The only thing to be wary of in these dark hidden corners of London are living thieves and pickpockets. Even the vagrants can be threatening after they have been drinking illicit cider.”

  I laughed as, nevertheless, Clara pulled me by the arm to hasten our way to the main gate.

  When this story began it was late and dismal autumn. Every morning, mist rose and hung over the nearby River Thames after a cold night and when it turned milder for a day or two, the choking fog rolled over the city, muffling sounds, blurring the outlines of buildings and tasting foul in the mouth and nostrils, so that everyone went about with their faces half -covered in mufflers. Braziers burned at street corners, where hot chestnut and potato sellers rubbed hands stiff and blue with cold. Traffic crawled along the Strand to Fleet Street, headlamps looming like great hazy moons out of the mist. Fleet Street was a din of hot metal presses turning out the daily and evening newspapers. Open a small wooden door in a wall and you would see a bedlam of huge iron machines and the clatter of chutes, down which rolled copies of the Evening News and Standard, The Times and the Chronicle, by the mile. Men at work below were dwarfed by the presses, faces grimy with oil and the air was thick with the smell of it and of fresh ink and warm paper.

  I loved it and wandered these old streets whenever I had a half hour to spare, venturing up unfamiliar passages and alleys into courts and squares, discovering hidden churches and little gardens. But best of all I liked to walk beside the river, or to stand on the terrace of the medical school which overlooked its great flowing expanse, now treacle black, now sparkling in the sun and carrying so many and varied craft on its tide. Such idle moments were rare, however. I was usually attending patients, following great physicians on their ward rounds, learning from the surgeons in theatre and the pathologists in the mortuary. I loved my work as I had loved every moment of my studies. I suppose the latest in a line of doctors would either take to medicine as a duck to water or rebel and become a bank manager.

  Two other doctors lived at No 2 Printer’s Devil Court at the time of which I write. Walter Powell, a year ahead of the rest, James Kent and Rafe McAllister. James and I occupied one floor, Walter and Rafe the other. It was a dark house, with steep, narrow stairs and we each had a miserably small bedroom and shared bathroom, with temperamental plumbing. But we had one large sitting room which stretched the width of the house and had a coal fire with a chimney that drew well, a reasonably comfortable sofa and three armchairs. There was a handsome mahogany table at which we ate and sometimes worked. The room had two windows, one at either end, in each of which stood a desk. There was precious little natural light and the outlook was of the opposite buildings. By now it was dark at four o’clock and lamps and fire were lit early.

  We kept irregular hours, sometimes working all day and all night, so we only met to eat or relax together a couple of times a week. The landlady, Mrs Ratchet, rarely spoke a word but she looked after us well enough in her way, cleaning and clearing, making the beds and the fire and providing food at odd hours. We were fortunate, hard-working and innocent — or so I thought.

  I got on well with my fellows. James was a simple, easy-going man, with little imagination but with a great deal of human sensibility. He was a plain-speaking and compassionate doctor in the making.

  Rafe was serious, studious and silent. He was never unfriendly and yet I could not get to know him — he presented a closed-off front and seemed to live in a world of test tubes and apparently dreamed only of finding cures for rare and obscure conditions. He had little to do with patients, which was probably for the best but I judged that one day he would make some remarkable medical breakthrough, in his own, intense and purposeful way.

  Walter Powell was an even more complex character. If ever I felt a dislike or approval of any of my fellows, it was of him. He was jovial and friendly enough but he had a sly way with him and something shadowy in his personality though I could not have put a finger on quite what — at least not then. The only way I can give any idea of how he — and indeed, Rafe — affected me is to say that I would happily have entrusted my life to James but to Walter and Rafe, never.

  PART TWO

  1

  It was a murky November evening with a fog off the river and a fuzzy halo round every street lamp, when the conversation which was to have such a hideous outcome took place.

  All four of us had returned to our lodging house earlier than usual and eaten lamb stew and treacle pudding together at the big table — Mrs Ratchet knew how to line the stomachs of hungry young doctors in such blea
k weather. Everything had been cleared away and we sat with a precious bottle of port, generously provided by James’s wine merchant brother, around a good fire. James and Walter had lit their pipes and the sweet smell of old Holborn tobacco was pleasing to the two of us who did not smoke.

  We had begun to talk in an idle way about our day’s work. I had been following an eminent thoracic specialist on his ward round, taking in as much as I could — he kept up a brisk pace — about rare lung diseases, and then working in the crowded outpatient clinics. Walter had been in the mortuary, assisting at the post mortems of bodies washed up or pulled out of the River Thames. One had been trapped under the hull of an abandoned barge for several weeks, he told us with a certain relish. I shuddered but he merely smiled his tight little smile.

  “You will have to acquire a stronger stomach for the game, Hugh.”

  “Hardly a game.”

  He shrugged and for a moment we all fell silent. The fire shifted down. James bent forward and threw on another couple of coals. And then Walter said, “What opinions do we all have about the story of the raising of Lazarus?”

  I suppose the leap from bodies drowned in the River Thames to the New Testament story of the man miraculously raised from the dead by Jesus was not such a great one but the question silenced us again.

  “I`m not sure I remember many of the details,” I said at last. “I rather switched off the chapel sermons in my senior school years.” James said that he knew the story. Rafe did not speak

  “Or that of the centurion’s daughter?” Walter continued, taking the pipe from his mouth to smile again. I remember noticing what a pale complexion he had, even in the ruddy glow from the fire which gave the others a more cheerful aspect. Walter’s hair was already receding, showing his high forehead and oddly large skull.

  “Come, you must all have some theory.”

  “I am no biblical scholar,” James said, “but for what it is worth, I believe fully in the stories. They have the ring of truth.”

  “Of course,” Walter nodded. “You, as a conscientious Christian would. But as a medical man?”

  Rafe got up abruptly and went out. We heard his footsteps going up the stairs two at a time. He returned to the room carrying a Bible. “Let us read the exact accounts before we express any further opinions.”

  I noted that it took him almost no time to find the relevant pages, which surprised me as I had not put Rafe down as a religious man. We settled quietly while he read first, in two of the Gospels, the account of the raising of Jairus’s daughter.

  “Well, that seems quite straightforward,” James said. “One line is conclusive and repeated in each gospel account. ‘The maid is not dead but sleepeth.’ As Jesus saw.”

  “Yes, plenty of that sort of thing.” I said. “We have all seen it — the deep coma resembling death. People have been pronounced dead and taken to the mortuary or even to the undertaker and consigned to their coffin, only to have woken again.”

  “Perhaps that would take care of Luke, Chapter 7?” Walter took up the Bible and, like Rafe, found the page almost immediately and quoted: “When he came to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out… And Jesus came and touched the bier and said, ‘Young man, I say to thee, arise’. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak.”

  “More problematic all the same. The man was on the bier being taken for burial, which has to take place very quickly in hot countries,” Walter said. “I vote that this was another case of the deep coma — the man had a lucky escape.”

  James looked perturbed. Walter flipped the pages and found the story of the raising of Lazarus. “Here,” he said, a slight smugness in his tone, “this is unequivocal, I think. ‘Now he had been in the grave for four days…’”

  “Can we be sure of that?” I asked.

  “No, but the story is quite detailed — why would they lie? His sister says, ‘by this time he stinketh for he hath been dead four days’.”

  Rafe looked blank yet I thought I caught the glint of something like excitement in his eyes.

  “Listen then,” Walter continued, reading from the text: “Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave cloths and his face was bound about with a napkin.”

  James sat back. “And that,” he said, “I do believe.”

  Thinking to lighten the atmosphere, I knelt on the hearth rug and made up the fire, poking at it to loosen the ashes below, then adding more coals. The whole flared up so quickly that I started back and as I did so, I glanced round the room. James sat very still, his demeanour very calm. Rafe’s face was closed and expressionless, his eyes down. Walter was looking directly at me with an expression I could not wholly read, but which seemed almost rapacious, so that I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  “I vote for another glass of port,” I said, “if James would allow.”

  He jumped up at once and busied himself over refilling the glasses. When he had seated himself again, Walter said, “You two were not here when Rafe and I began discussions on this subject.”

  “Discussion about the miracles of Jesus Christ?” I said, surprised.

  “Not exactly.” Walter leaned forward and I caught the same glint in his eyes as I had noticed in Rafe’s.

  “Oh, it was nothing but some macabre joking,” Walter said, giving Rafe a quick look, as if in warning. “We had both had some encounters with death in its various forms that day and you know as well as I that we need a touch of gallows humour to see us through. That is why medical students traditionally play such ghoulish tricks on one another.”

  James laughed. “Like Anderson in the dissecting room and…”

  Walter held out his hand. “Yes, yes.” Something in his tone doused our mirth in the incident. “But other than in those remote biblical times — and who knows how reliable the witnesses were after all? —have any of us heard of men, or women, for that matter, being raised from the dead? By dead I mean exactly that. Dead.”

  “Well of course not,” Walter went on. “Yet you are ready to believe in incidents recorded more than two thousand years ago.”

  James nodded but said nothing.

  “Let’s leave biblical times. Do any of us believe that this miracle could be performed now? Though clearly not by the man Jesus.”

  “So what are you talking about?” I asked. “Do you mean by those who serve in His ministry now?”

  “No. By men like us — doctors and scientists that we are.”

  I saw that he and Rafe exchanged another glance.

  “Is this some fantasy you have been beguiling yourselves with on your walks to and from the hospital?” I asked, for Walter and Rafe generally went together.

  Now, Rafe leaned forward with some eagerness. “It is far more than that, and we are not men to waste time on fantasies.”

  James looked troubled but I simply laughed.

  “Enough teasing,” I said, “you had better tell us, as it’s the time of a dismal evening for a good tale.” My voice sounded over-loud and hearty in the room.

  “I assure you that I am deadly serious and so is Rafe. But if you cannot be, let us say no more on the subject.” Walter tamped and fidgeted away with his pipe.

  “Come now,” I said, “I will take you at your word. Let us hear what you have to say and we can make up our own minds.”

  Walter continued to work away at the pipe, like an actor confident that he has his audience and can keep them waiting. Eventually it was lit to his satisfaction and he drew on it a few times before beginning.

  “As you may have guessed by now, I have been considering our subject for some time. And because I am no more than a basic scientist, whereas Rafe here is a scientific genius, I have discussed it all with him. I have put difficult questions to him, and he to me, and we have each played devil’s advocate. Now we have reached the point where we think we should bring you two into the secret. On one condition.”

  He took the pipe f
rom his mouth again and paused, enjoying the melodrama of the moment.

  “So what is your condition, Walter?”

  “That you must want to know, and know everything. If you do not — perhaps I will say ‘dare not’ — we will continue to share these agreeable lodgings with you both as usual and never mention the matter again.”

  Walter looked steadfastly at me and then James, and I was so mesmerised by the look in his eyes as he stared that I could not glance away.

  “That is all very well,” I said, “but how on earth can I tell you I don’t want to hear a word more when I don’t know what it is all about?”

  “But you do. You have been given more than a hint — quite enough on which to base a decision.”

  “The subject being the miracles of raising the dead?”

  “Not precisely. As I said, we are not biblical scholars and those times are long past. It was a convenient way of introducing the nature of the business, that is all.”

  “Well for my part,” James said, “I don’t understand any of it.” He looked at me.

  “I must say that my instincts tell me to remain in ignorance — even in innocence.” I paused. I was still more or less convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate game on Walter’s part.

  Rafe’s chair was pulled back into the shadows so that his face was hidden, only his spectacles occasionally gleaming in the firelight. Now he said quietly, “Just remember that what you know you can never unknow. If you are afraid…”

  “Of course not. What trick could you cook up that would be so alarming?”

  Rafe did not reply.

  “Make your decision,” Walter said.

  “Before I reply,” I said, “tell us why it is so important to make us party to whatever game you propose to play.”

  “Because you may find it more interesting and remarkable than you suppose. Because you will be entirely impartial witnesses. And because we may need your help. It would not be easy to find two other men we know so well and more importantly, whom we trust.”