The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [95]
Steve and I look around the packed, closed room.
“The Victorians had one solution for that level of contamination: fire.”
“Fire,” I repeat to myself. The word crackles.
“In Victorian London, there was an official called the inspector of nuisances—”
“Nuisance must have had a different meaning then,” Steve interjects.
“Oh yes, it wasn’t the guy that pesters you, saying ‘Do you want to buy any naughty postcards?’” He laughs. “No, nuisances as in epidemics, infectious epidemics. Smallpox, chicken pox, all that sort of thing. This group was responsible for disinfecting or cleaning out the infection from a house or an area. They would probably have gone in and just said, ‘Right, strip this room down to the bare plaster and just burn everything.’”
Keith hesitates for a moment. “This is just a theory, but I reckon that’s what carried away the evidence that you and I so desperately want—”
“His papers.” I can see them going into the flames. “His letters, diaries—”
“Possibly, yeah,” Keith says, hedging a bit. “I don’t know for sure.”
“No, I’m sure you’re right,” I respond. “That’s what happened to his new book, the one on tumors—”
“And his revisions for the next edition of Gray’s,” says Steve, tossing more fuel on the fire, “his original manuscript.”
His clothes, the rugs, his Bible—we heap everything on the pile.
“Yes,” Keith nods. “A bonfire of everything he had touched.”
Sixteen
THE WELLCOME LIBRARY DOESN’T HAVE A SINGLE MS. WHEAT. NO, it has four Ms. Wheats, one of whom is a silver-haired man. The staff person presiding over the Special Collections Room has changed throughout the day: the petite brown-haired young woman who greeted us at 9:30 and gave us the first folder of letters from the Carter archive morphed into a middle-aged man, who, next time I glanced over, had turned into a fortyish matronly type—a cousin to Valerie Wheat—and then, wordlessly, back into another young woman, this one with ruddy skin and a nose piercing. But—who knows?—maybe there was yet another librarian sitting there in between those last two. Since arriving, Steve and I have hardly looked up from the piles of letters.
Every page of every letter—every scrap of paper in the Carter Papers, including actual scraps of paper—bears a tiny penciled number identifying its proper place in each of eighteen separate folders. Despite the impeccable organization, however, there’s no math that makes it easy to calculate how long it will take to get through a single folder. It depends as much on the number of pieces as on their readability, length, and relevance. There are more than three hundred items in the Carter archive, and over the next few days, we have many loose ends to tie off. Our unexpected discovery at the British Library, for instance—that Carter had not, in fact, put Gray’s Anatomy behind him in coming to India—has made me rethink another assumption: that he’d put his old friend Henry Gray behind him as well. Now I have a new thought. Gray must come up in Carter’s correspondence, but where and when?
Near the bottom of a box of letters to Lily is the answer: The eighty-eighth of 116 letters, dated October 10, 1861, to be precise: “You will know (‘young’) Mr. Gray is dead,” he tells his sister, adding on a sorrowful note, just as he was “on the threshold of a high career.” As his phrasing indicates, he is not breaking the news to Lily; she would have heard or read about it long before word reached him in Bombay. Rather, H.V. is tacitly sharing his grief, which I find all the more moving. Lily had visited her brother in London twice during his years there and perhaps had met “Mr. Gray” in person. Better than anyone, she would know how keenly he felt the loss of this extraordinary man.
As an object, the letter itself captures the delicate emotions