A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [345]
These ranged from the merely grotesque to the truly startling. One by one, he brought out a big toe sporting a wart the size and color of an edible mushroom, a preserved tongue which had been split—apparently during the owner’s lifetime, as the two halves were quite healed—a cat with six legs, a grossly malformed brain (“Removed from a hanged murderer,” as he proudly informed me. “I shouldn’t wonder,” I murmured in reply, thinking of Donner and wondering what his brain might look like), and several infants, presumably stillborn, and exhibiting assorted atrocious deformities.
“Now, this,” he said, lifting down a large glass cylinder in trembling hands, “is quite the prize of my collection. There is a most distinguished physician in Germany, a Herr Doktor Blumenbach, who has a world-renowned collection of skulls, and he has been pursuing me—nay, absolutely pestering me, I assure you!—in an effort to persuade me to part with it.”
“This” was the defleshed skulls and spinal column of a double-headed infant. It was, in fact, fascinating. It was also something that would cause any woman of childbearing age to swear off sex immediately.
Grisly as the doctor’s collection was, though, it offered me an excellent opportunity for approaching my true errand.
“That is truly amazing,” I said, leaning forward as though to examine the empty orbits of the floating skulls. They were separate and complete, I saw; it was the spinal cord that had divided, so that the skulls hung side by side in the fluid, ghostly white and leaning toward each other so that the rounded heads touched gently, as though sharing some secret, only separating when a movement of the jar caused them momentarily to float apart. “I wonder what causes such a phenomenon?”
“Oh, doubtless some dreadful shock to the mother,” Doctor Fentiman assured me. “Women in an expectant condition are fearfully vulnerable to any sort of excitement or distress, you know. They must be kept quite sequestered and confined, well away from any injurious influences.”
“I daresay,” I murmured. “But you know, some malformations—that one, for instance?—I believe are the result of syphilis in the mother.”
It was; I recognized the typical malformed jaw, the narrow skull, and the caved-in appearance of the nose. This child had been preserved with flesh intact, and lay curled placidly in its bottle. By the size and lack of hair, it had likely been premature; I hoped for its own sake that it had not been born alive.
“Shiphi—syphilis,” the doctor repeated, swaying a little. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes. I got that particular little creature from a, um . . .” It occurred to him belatedly that syphilis was perhaps not a topic suitable to discuss with a lady. Murderer’s brains and two-headed children, yes, but not venereal disease. There was a jar in the closet that I was reasonably sure contained the scrotum of a Negro male who had suffered from elephantiasis; I noticed he hadn’t shown me that one.
“From a prostitute?” I inquired sympathetically. “Yes, I suppose such misfortunes must be common among such women.”
To my annoyance, he slithered away from the desired topic.
“No, no. In fact—” He darted a look over his shoulder, as though fearing to be overheard, then leaned near me and whispered hoarsely, “I received that specimen from a colleague in London, some years ago. It is reputed to be the child of a foreign nobleman!”
“Oh, dear,” I said, taken aback. “How . . . interesting.”
At this rather inconvenient point, the servant came in with tea—or rather, with a revolting concoction of roasted acorns and chamomile, stewed in water—and the conversation turned ineluctably toward social trivia. I was afraid that the tea might sober him up before I could inveigle him back in the right direction, but luckily the tea tray also included a decanter of fine claret, which I dispensed