Sawbones Read Online Free Page A

there, sir,” Ezra said. “Drowned, I reckon. Five, six days ago. Some putrefaction in the eyes. The skin on the hands and fingers is beginning to slip. Signs of the rickets. If he’d not drowned I don’t think this one would’ve been long for this world.”
    McAdam nodded. “Good, good.” He frowned thoughtfully. “If anyone asks, we’ll say the man died on a boat come in from the West Indies. Ezra, fetch the bone saw. We’ll open him up before they come in and the students will be too busy swooning at their first sight of a man’s heart
in situ
to see the gunshot or the tattoo.”
    “As you wish, sir.”
    “Oh, and buck up, lad. Your face is a mask of sorrow.” Mr McAdam began to saw through the man’s sternum. He spoke up to be heard above the noise of metal on bone. “Mrs Boscaven has told all, and I assure you, I too know the pangs of first love. The trick, my boy, is to kill your feelings, just as we do every day in here. Dispatch those tender emotions just as swiftly and cleanly as one would a sick horse. Brooding is neither healthy nor productive.” Mr McAdam smiled. “Unless, perhaps, one is a poet!”
    “No, sir,” Ezra said, taking the saw and wiping it clean. It seemed every soul in the parish knew his business! Why, he would not have been surprised if the man on the table had piped up to offer advice, even with only half a tongue.
    The students had gone. Ezra was sewing up the cadavers, ready for Mr Allen and his company to come and dispose of them once darkness fell. He had cleaned the sawdust and removed the bucket of vomit that one would-be surgeon had filled on discovering the contents of the adult cadaver’s stomach. The smell of partially digested food, which Mr McAdam had eagerly shown his students, had obviously proved too much.
    Ezra, having seen the insides of man and boy many times over, had spent the lecture trying hard to think about anything other than Anna. Holland was not so far away, he told himself. After all, this man on the table had travelled twice as far at least. As, of course, had he, from Jamaica to England, a long time ago.
    She would write. She
would
write. He sighed and looked down at the tall man on the table, sewn up smartly; imposing even in death, but in life, slave, subject to another’s orders with no independence of thought or action. Ezra felt powerless. He was no better, he reasoned, than a kind of slave. He had no money of his own, made no decisions. How would he ever travel to see her?
    Ezra finished his work and covered the cadaver before moving on to the child. Of course he didn’t
have
to sew them up: the paupers these two corpses would be sharing graves with would not care whether or not the contents of their winding sheets were intact. No, but it was good practice. Ezra wanted his stitches to be as good as his master’s. Small, neat, perfect.
    “Aha, Ezra. Still hard at work.” Mr McAdam looked over his stitches. “You have a good hand, lad. A good hand. You will make a fine surgeon.”
    “Thank you, sir.” Ezra looked up; the master was smiling. Perhaps there was a way around his current problem. “Sir, if you please, I would ask you a question. If you have a moment.”
    “Of course,” Mr McAdam said. “Ask away.”
    Ezra put down his needle. He took a deep breath. “I was thinking. I was sixteen this autumn and come of age—”
    The master butted in. “Only God knows your true age, Ezra. It was an estimate, from your height and the length of your bones, and how your teeth had come on. Birthdays are a luxury for the rich or for those with the comfort of family. When I bought you in Spanish Town you had neither.”
    “I know that, sir. I have heard the story very many times. I do wonder that I can’t remember my life before, not one single thing, not any sale or any transaction. Nothing.”
    “It is not unnatural. We tend to bury bad experiences, memories. Otherwise they can hurt us, make us bitter.”
    Ezra nodded. “I wanted to