Sawbones Read Online Free

grinning as he helped himself to Ezra’s portion of porridge, “as you’ve just found out about the St John girl pushing off back to where she comes from.” Toms was only a year or so older than Ezra but liked to think it made all the difference as far as knowledge of worldly matters went.
    Mrs Boscaven tutted. Ezra gritted his teeth; it was all he could do to keep his face from betraying his feelings.
    Toms went on, “Going away with her brother, I heard. Didn’t want no brown babies! ’Specially not ones whose daddy might have been in a freak show!” He tipped his head on one side and held a breakfast roll up as if it were attached to the side of his face like a tumour, and laughed. “Or worse, someone who’s only worth tuppence and should be sold back to the West Indies where he came from!”
    Ezra pushed his chair back and got up, fists ready. He was going to punch the idiot into next week. Mrs Boscaven put a hand on his shoulder.
    “Don’t you dare talk that way, Henry Toms!” she said sharply. “Or I’ll make sure the master knows what happens to the ends of his candles, and his soap. And that pair of breeches you swore blind went missing.”
    Toms looked shifty. Ezra didn’t sit back down. He took his coffee and left.
    It was light in the anatomy room. Ezra had covered both cadavers with a sheet the night before; they lay side by side on the dark, stained table. Ezra sipped his coffee. He was not a slave and he was not a freak. He pushed Toms’ words away – he had work to do. Outside he could hear the first of the students queuing up in the cold. He reminded himself he had to see Mr McAdam before the lecture began, tell him about the tongueless man, the gunshot and the tattoo.
    Ezra looked up through the glass roof to the iron-grey sky. He sighed and wished he were somewhere else.
    “Ah, Ezra, here all ready!” Mr McAdam swept into the room. “Open the doors and let the poor frozen truth seekers in, lad.”
    Ezra put down his coffee cup and tied on his apron. “Sir, please. There’s something I need to show you first.”
    “The child? Has putrefaction set in?” The surgeon took a deep breath in. “Aah! You’ve made good with the rosemary. It smells more like a herb garden than an anatomizing room.”
    “Thank you, sir. No, sir. It’s the man.” Ezra lifted up the sheet. “It’s a shot wound. And not a duel with pistols. He’s a Negro, and the word of such a fight would have been all over the city.”
    “You’re right, lad. Well spotted. What else?” Mr McAdam took his glasses out of his waistcoat pocket and put them on.
    “His hands, sir – a gentleman’s hands. He must be wealthy, sir. And, by the look of things, shot in the back.”
    Mr McAdam raised an eyebrow.
    “One more thing, sir,” Ezra said. “He’s had his tongue cut away.”
    “Recently? In death?”
    “No, a long time ago. See? Oh, and sir, you see this mark, on his forearm, I couldn’t…”
    McAdam leant closer and picked up the lifeless limb. “Arabic. Could be Persian. Makes sense. The rulers of those houses often cut the tongues of their servants.”
    “But his hands, sir…”
    “There is more than one kind of work, Ezra.”
    Mr McAdam said nothing for a long time. He looked again in the man’s mouth, then at where the earrings had been pulled out of his ears, and at the gunshot wound. Finally he looked up. They could hear the crowd waiting on the other side of the door, shuffling and stamping their feet to keep warm in the cold.
    “This is an odd fish and no mistake,” he said at last. “Belonged to someone important, no doubt.”
    “Belonged? He was a slave?”
    “I would think so. We must hope his master doesn’t miss him. I could make enquiries at the Ottoman Embassy. Met a fellow at a surgeon’s dinner, can’t for the life of me remember his name. Ali? Aziz? Worked as a surgeon for the sultan, apparently. Perhaps our man here is one of theirs. How’s the child?”
    “Nothing unusual