The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [51]
While finding Joe “certainly very exasperating occasionally,” H.V. also saw great artistic potential. The two often visited galleries and museums together, sharing in the splendid works in the royal collections—paintings by Titian, Turner, and H.V.’s namesake, Van Dyck, among others. What’s more, just as their father had a penchant for giving impromptu art lessons, H.V. had taken it upon himself to give his brother “anatomical lessons,” believing that a solid grasp of human anatomy was essential to Joe’s education. “He won’t make a good anatomist,” Carter reported dryly to Lily after one such lesson, but that their little brother would one day be known as a great artist, he seemed to have little doubt.
And now that he was gone, H.V. missed him terribly.
“Feel very dull without Joe,” he admits to himself—and to an empty apartment—after ten days on his own.
By the end of September, Henry Gray was back in town—and back to his old self. Within days, he had offered Carter a new challenge, asking him to create two drawings of a size and complexity he had never attempted. These huge drawings of the chest would be used in the classroom at St. George’s, where Gray was now in his second session as lecturer of Practical Anatomy.
Carter agreed to the assignment, though not without private reservations. Rather than feeling idle, he now had the opposite problem: “Am too copious in plans,” as he puts it, and that’s putting it mildly. On top of rebottling hundreds of specimens at the college and helping Mr. Queckett prepare his histology lectures, he must squeeze in time to study for the M.B.’s. But at least he’s busy. He really is happiest when he’s busy—or, to be more precise, when he doesn’t have time to be unhappy. Before he has even finished the drawings, though, Carter gets slammed with a fresh set of demands: His uncle pays an unexpected visit to London, expecting H.V. to play dutiful nephew and host. Sylvester takes an indefinite leave from his job, leaving Carter to do double duty. And then another professor at the college recruits Carter to perform dissections for him, the first assignment being a whopper of a walrus. He is just barely keeping his head above water when, literally from the top of the world, shattering news arrives concerning Joseph Bellot.
“It is my melancholy duty to inform you…[that] he has lost his life,” the story in The Times of London begins.
Although it reads like a personal letter of condolence, the Tuesday, October 11, story is actually a transcript of a dispatch filed from Her Majesty’s Ship North Star at Beechey Island in the Northwest Passage. The twenty-seven-year-old French lieutenant had returned to the Arctic as part of a new English expedition searching for Sir John Franklin,1 and things had gone terribly wrong, as the commanding officer reports. While making a perilous ice crossing with two shipmates, Lieutenant Bellot plunged into the dark waters of the Wellington Channel and drowned. His body was not recovered.
Though the dispatch had only just reached London, the tragedy had actually occurred eight weeks earlier. But as Carter and much of the city read the account, Bellot perished right there on the page.
Lieutenant Bellot was mourned in England and France and served in a small way to unite these historically antagonistic countries. Emperor Napoleon III took the unusual step of granting a pension to Bellot’s family, while in England funds were raised to erect an obelisk near the river Thames to commemorate the Frenchman’s role in the search for Franklin. The Times, following up on the story, ran a series of testimonials to the intrepid polar explorer. H. V. Carter submitted one himself, fondly recollecting his “accidental encounter” with Bellot in Paris. To gauge the full impact Bellot’s death had on Carter, however, one needs to go back to his