'Phrenology, or the causes of crime' by Jonathan Gibbs
1.
‘Here,’ says Morley. ‘The coronal region. See?’
I track the movement of his fingers, how they glide across the head’s shaven crown. They trace arcs and points, marking out fields on the skin as surely as if he were using a scalpel. His fingers move down to behind the ear. ‘Compare to the squama temporalis.’ His eyes find me. ‘Show me,’ he says.
Then, when I hesitate, ‘He won’t bite.’
I go over and put my hands in under his. I feel his skin on mine, his and this other’s. His hands tug away and I am left holding the head. How heavy it is. I look down and cannot avoid the eyes. They gaze up, without complaint, straight into mine.
Edmond Catton, who murdered his landlord, and his landlord’s wife. Stabbed and then slashed the man with a knife, a dozen times, if you believe what you read. Slit her throat for her and left it at that. A small mercy. Then he sent their son, a moppet of four years, off into the street. ‘Fetch a bobby, boy,’ he said to him. Then, when the bobby came, he killed the bobby. But still he spared the boy.
I shift my left hand to take the full weight, and point with the other.
‘Coronal region. Very small.’ My voice is gruff, feeble. I point to the side of the skull. ‘Temporal bone. Squama temporalis, very pronounced.’
‘Very good,’ he says. ‘That will do.’
He flourishes his calipers. They gleam in the lamplight, like the mandibles of some monstrous metal insect. He tucks the ball end into the ear and swings the pointed end out over the globe of the head to touch, now at the temple, now at the rear of the skull. He sketches half a dozen measurements, murmuring the names as he does so.
‘Amativeness. Combativeness. Destructiveness. Cautiousness. Imagination. Passion. Pleasure and Pain. Habit.’
The calipers, folded and stowed.
‘The whole thing, Mr Harris. I want every inch of him mapped and charted as if he were the coast of Singapore. And fast. The courts will be onto us to have him. And, for God’s sake, have a care with the brain. Handle it as if it were your own.’
I lower the head to the table, hear the slow heavy knock of bone against marble.
There must be something pitiful in my face for, when he laughs, there is warmth in the sharpness.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Harris. Just because he is a cold-blooded murderer it doesn’t follow that he’ll be any harder to cut up. Mr Smithwick did the ticklish bit for you, with his rope.’
‘Would that his mother had done it herself, when he was born,’ I say.
‘Aye? And saved Mr Smithwick his trouble?’
‘And the lives of those poor wretches.’
Morley has his jacket now. He is coming back towards the table. It’s not me he has his eyes on, though. It’s Catton.
‘He’s just as much a poor wretch as they, Mr Harris, wouldn’t you say?’
He lays his fingers down again on the man’s head, tucks away a strand of hair from where it lies, with all the gentleness you’d think he uses with his own children.
‘Isn’t this just what we are about? Think of it, Harris. We have the knowledge almost in our grasp that will allow not just a diagnosis of the ill body, but the ill society.’ He taps with his finger against the forehead. ‘Phrenology, Harris. It’s all in there. How could he ever have acted any different?’
He puts his hat on his head.
‘Well, I’ll take my leave. You’ve a long night ahead of you.’
He goes, and I listen to the sound of his footsteps in the hospital corridor, straining my neck to hear their last faintest whispered fall.
When they are gone, I walk slowly around the table, running a finger along the cold marble. Not letting my eyes leave the dead man.
I make my way, moving backwards, to the wall, and reach behind me for the surgical saw. Beside me on the bench, a bottle of alcohol.
Back at the table, I lay the saw on Catton’s chest.
I roll up the sleeves of my coat, unstop the bottle and upend its mouth onto a cloth. I clean the blade.
I set the saw to his throat.
The teeth snag on his skin.
I pull.
2.
It is four days later. The job is done, or my part of it. I have taken the measurements, correlating them as best I can to my copy of Gall, and passed the whole onto Morley. Catton’s brain, too, has gone to him, held in arsenic.
I am laid up in my room, relaxing after my exertions, proud of my work. I’ve been steeping myself further in Gall and Combe, comparing Catton to the thugs they give as examples of such types. Dreaming of the day my own discoveries will be bound and sent out into the world, like theirs. To be pored over by ambitious hotheads like me.
A rap on my door. The voice of Mrs Read.
‘Mr Harris. A gentleman to see you. From Doctor Morley. He asks that you make haste.’
The driver tells me nothing, just closes the door of the carriage, climbs up and is off. A half hour later we are in Kensington. We arrive outside a four-storey house in elegant stucco. Its windows are tall dark rectangles, its great doors hidden inside a pillared portico. It is joined on one side to another house, identical. Or not identical. They are mirror images of each other. The whole thing as grand and symmetrical as the brain’s twin hemispheres. I go in on the right.
I am shown into the drawing room. Morley turns dramatically as I enter.
‘Harris. Good man, good man. Come in. Can I get you some coffee?’
I thank him, yes. He himself has taken something stronger than coffee, I can tell. He is smoking a small, foreign-looking cigar that he draws on with intense concentration. He paces. It is a long room, but he confines himself to the shorter breadth. He paces a full minute before he talks, stopping at the mantle.
‘Harris, this is a historic moment. The new philosophy is gaining ground. We meet disbelief and obstruction at every turn, but when have men ever met truth with anything else? Great days are near, but we must not wait for them. We must rush to meet them.
‘Gall has been our father, Combe our guide, but their methods have been diagnostic. I believe this science, if it is to fulfill its true potential as agent for the betterment of human life, must become an active tool. Understanding is not enough. We must turn that understanding to action.’
A knock at the door brings the coffee. He waits for the man to go.
‘I fear I am talking in abstractions, Mr Harris. Come, there is someone I want you to meet.’
And we go out of the room and down the stairs to the large kitchen.
In it are an older woman – a cook or housekeeper – and a younger one, seated on a chair next to the table. She holds herself upright, with her hands in her lap, but she cannot hide how afraid she is. She looks very poor, and very pretty, and very out of place. Also, she is pregnant, perhaps seven months gone.
She looks up at our entrance. She might be my age.
Morley goes to her and stands behind her chair, a hand on its back.
‘Harris,’ he says. ‘This is Emma Buckley. Emma, Mr Harris, my assistant.’
I start at the name. The connection is immediate. She is Catton’s girlfriend. Widow, whatever you might call it.
‘How do you do?’ I say, from where I am standing, angry at the weakness in my voice. She does not answer.
‘Miss Buckley was, as you may know, the companion of our unfortunate friend Edmond Catton. I made contact with her, because I wanted to interview her, to add to the scientific portrait we have built up of the man, thanks in no small part to your assiduous labour, Mr Harris.
‘But, this went by the by when I became aware of her condition, which I see you have also noted. The child she carries is Catton’s. It is a sore predicament, and she was good enough to ask me my advice.’
Her head tips forward, dipping closer to the floor. The other woman stands rigid, hands clasped in front of her body, her face a great block of impassivity.
‘There is of course a measure she might have considered, that I will not mention, except to say I hope we live on the threshold of more enlightened times, that will render such actions anathema. What I said to her, and I say to you now, Harris, is that we should venerate life, but we should strive at all times to make that life good. Today, we have the means at our disposal to make this so.
‘Phrenology tells us that our souls and our bodies are twined together, as close as Baucis and Philemon. Experience tells us that inheritance drives down the generations, from father to son. Quite simply, what I intend to do tonight is to work on the character, the very genius of this unborn child, to purge from him those parts of his nature that are his father’s. A preacher might say, I intend to save his soul. As a scientist, I say, I will alter his character. And for that, again, I need your assistance.’
She is up on the oak table. I am at her head, with the chloroform and a clean rag. The tresses of her carrot-coloured hair laid out flat on either side. Her smooth, domed brow; her frightened eyes, that daren’t look at me. Her lips, moving in what must be prayer. Beyond that, her body is free of all but its underclothes. Her arms are bare, they quiver minutely.
Morley drinks down the last of his coffee and nods to me. I pour out half a teaspoonful of the clear liquid on the cloth and lay it gently over her mouth. She flinches, and her eyes dart to mine.
‘There, now,’ I say, quietly. ‘All will be well.’ And I place my other hand on her hair. I pull my fingers through it, in what I hope is a soothing fashion.
Morley waits, then steps up on a chair and swings himself onto the table, straddling the girl’s body as if he has just wrestled her to that position, and is about to commit some atrocity on her. She shifts uneasily, and her knees rise, but she is trapped. In a sudden movement he flings up her petticoats and reveals the whale-like mound of her belly. I shift my eyes away, from instinct or fear.
The cook is wittering some nonsense about God and Jesus, half under her breath.
The girl jerks again, and I press down with the cloth. Distant mournful sounds come from her. The cloth moves against my hand.
My other hand caressing her hair.
‘All will be well.’
Morley is rubbing and pushing at the belly, feeling with his fingers, then digging in with the heels of his hands, muttering and grunting all the time. She jerks and moans, and he must bear down on her to keep her in place. He leans and heaves at her from the side and I think of my mother, kneading dough for bread, and I wish that I was back home, in my mother’s kitchen, and not here.
‘Got you,’ says Morley, and he relaxes, shifting back onto his haunches, and he begins working away, insistently, at something beneath her skin.
He murmurs to himself, as he pushes and heaves at his veiled object, the words coming like an incantation.
‘Combativeness. Destructiveness. Benevolence. Hope.’
Her moans, more distant now.
I stroke her hair.
All will be well.
3.
And all was well.
A month later, the child was born. Morley delivered him. I assisted.
‘A bonny babe,’ he said, proudly holding up the red parcel of bawling, jerking limbs, then laying him down on the table to examine him. The baby wrangled too fiercely for exact measurement, but Morley pronounced himself entirely satisfied with the visual evidence.
No Whitechapel child ever had better medical care. We attended him every three months, taking full sets of measurements, talking with his mother and observing him. He cried, he laughed, he fed, he grew. And no wonder. Morley provided the mother with money for food and fuel, and with medicines.
She, too, flourished. Put some flesh between her thin bones and pale skin. Though the boy – called Benedict – smiled, she never did. Sometimes, while Morley busied himself with the boy, I sat with her. We would watch the eminent doctor crawling about on the floor after young Benedict. Then after Benedict walking. Then, haphazardly, stumble-running.
One year, two years, three. We brought him sweets and, in the summer, ices. Small wrapped presents for his birthdays and Christmases. She was happy that little Benedict was thriving, but something troubled her. At first I thought it was Morley’s attentions, that he was exacting or expecting some recompense from her for all his charity. I wished that I could intervene, but it was not in my grasp to do so. Then, one day she put her hand on my arm and quickly, quietly, asked me to come back to her room in the evening.
‘I can’t think how to express it,’ she said, looking at me fearfully. We were sitting in what she called her kitchen, but was really just the room that wasn’t the bedroom. I frowned and nodded, hoping to show how ready I was to help.
‘Is there anything wrong with him, perhaps, that you haven’t been able to tell Doctor Morley?’ I said.
She laughed, but it was a sad laugh.
‘Wrong?’ she said. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. There’s the problem, perhaps. He is a good child. He is healthy, and fine to look at, and is kind and loving. But I can’t love him.’
I let this thought settle.
She began to sob, a stifled, halting sound.
‘There, now,’ I said. I put my hand to her hair, and she fell against me, her cries coming suddenly unhindered.
‘He’s not mine. Your Doctor took him from me when he did that to me. I wish he’d never done it.’
My arm around her, I draw her to me and run my hand through her hair.
‘There, now,’ I say. ‘I can help.’
She sends out a neighbour for liquor. It is bad stuff but it will do the job,
She brings the child in. He smiles up at her, half-hidden in sleep.
I take a long draught of the gin. Then I pour some into a small glass and offer it to the boy, still held in his mother’s arms.
He drinks, gags, spits.
‘Tip his head back,’ I say.
I hold his nose and pour the liquid down his throat.
He screams and flails.
Again. Any more and he will puke.
He hits out.
‘Give him to me,’ I say to her. I tell her to go. Now she is crying, looking at me fearfully. How she used to look at Morley.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, and I marvel at the power of my voice, how readily she responds to it. ‘It cannot be done without pain, but it will bring your boy back to you. I promise you that.’
I take another drink of the deadly stuff. I sit down and lay the crying child over my knees. Push up the dirty blond curls at his neck. Feel with my fingers, muttering the names to myself. Combativeness. Amativeness. ‘There.’ I find Destructiveness, behind the ear. I push.
The boy screams.
The bone is hard. I push harder.
He screams louder. I take a knife from the table, reverse it in my hand, and knuckle it in, handle-first, there where Destructiveness meets Secretiveness. I get behind the squama and push. Scream. Push. Scream.
I come back the following week and do it again. We’ve got ten weeks till I am due here again with Morley. I will take them away from here if I have to.
She looks drawn and pained, but reaches to kiss me when I come in.
I’ve bought my own liquor this time. And a small bully club.
I try to talk to Benedict. I hunker down on the floor, offer him a twist of sherbert, but he won’t look at me.
I go to lift up his hair, to see behind his ear, but he pulls away.
‘Now, now, Benedict,’ I say. I catch hold of him and pull him to me.
The skin is badly bruised, and when I feel to see if there is any change he flinches and hits out at me.
This time, I cry, too, as I work. The way to truth is hard.
The next time, when I go to reach out to me, he bites my hand.
‘Benedict!’ Emma shrills, and she slaps him about the head. ‘Doctor Harris is here to help you.’
I’m not a doctor yet, of course – my studies have another six months to run – but I don’t correct her. In any case, if I am to spirit them away before Morley sees Benedict again, I’ll never have the chance to finish them. Morley won’t understand – that, sometimes, there is a greater good than science itself.
No matter. I have my life’s work, my success, right here.
Emma says she can see the change beginning.
She hugs him, as he cries, and tells him she loves him.
All will be well, she tells him.
