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Chapter One
December 1884
The cluster of traffic along James Street broke apart, giving Leonora Spencer an opening. She darted off the pavement and across the narrow lane, careful to avoid a few puddles of icy slush. The first flakes of winter snow had fallen two days ago, followed by a sleeting rain that had coated cobblestones and wood paving blocks around the city in an icy crust.
Once across the street, Leo returned to the raised pavement and readjusted the basket in the crook of her arm. The sign for Tate’s Funeral Service was just ahead, and for once, she looked forward to stepping inside. While she detested the scent of lilies that so often permeated the air inside an undertaker’s premises, where the flowers were arranged and ready for funeral processions and graveside burials, her numbed toes would appreciate the warmth of the building’s interior. In truth, she’d been cold all morning while working at the Spring Street Morgue.
This time of year, the stone blocks that made up the old vestry-turned-morgue absorbed the frigid air and held onto it throughout the day. Despite needing to wear a jacket indoors, and sometimes gloves, Leo vastly preferred the cold to the summer months, when the day’s heat increased the decay of corpses and filled the air with all the unsavory accompanying odors of decomposition. She never flinched at dead bodies, but in the winter, she could at least breathe more easily around them.
The bell above the door to Tate’s chimed her entrance, and as Leo stepped inside, warm air wrapped around her. So did the rotting scent of floral sprays.
“Ah, Miss Spencer,” greeted the funeral director, Mr. Otto Tate. In his early fifties, he possessed a rotund middle and a swirl of thin, copper hair neatly combed around his bald pate.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Tate.” She closed the door behind her, shutting out the clatter of traffic along the street. “Is my uncle out back?”
Once the assistant coroner at the Spring Street Morgue, Leo’s uncle, Claude Feldman, had now been working at Tate’s for a handful of months. He went in a few days each week to manage the process of embalming, a skilled task that took a steel-like constitution—something Mr. Tate had confessed to Leo he did not possess. Thankfully, the tremors afflicting Claude’s hands, which had ended his career performing postmortem examinations at the morgue, did not matter so much when preparing the dead for viewing at a funeral service.
“I do wish you would not join him, Miss Spencer. I am more than happy for you to use my office to take your tea together,” Mr. Tate offered, a pleading squint to his eyes, set behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.
Leo brought her uncle his midday meal at least once a week, and so she’d become a familiar face to Mr. Tate. Even so, he had yet to accept that the sight of her uncle’s work would not spoil her appetite.
“I thank you for your concern, Mr. Tate, but it truly does not disturb me,” she replied, once again. Surely, he thought her hardiness strange. Most people did.
Leo could only imagine his reaction if he ever learned that at one time, she’d even been helping her uncle to make neat incisions and place closing sutures when his shaking hands could not manage those tasks. The new assistant coroner at the morgue, Connor Quinn, would never have allowed her to do such things, nor would she attempt them. Noting the coroner’s findings, typing postmortem reports and death certificates, attending to family members, and seeing to the official registry of personal items that arrived with each corpse were the duties she much preferred.
Leo took herself through the front parlor to a door leading to a collection of rooms in the back. Customers were not permitted here, where a sharp, overly sweet odor of formaldehyde took over. Leo preferred the smell of the embalming fluid to that of the sickly lilies, which had always reminded her of her family’s funeral.
After seventeen years, the memory of that day was still vivid in her mind, though she didn’t think it was just due to her photographic memory, which captured everything she saw as images, then stored them in the endless depths of her mind for later perusal. No, Leo believed any person who’d been made to walk behind the caskets bearing their parents and siblings to their graves would likely recall the memory clearly.
Leo didn’t understand how or why her peculiar memory functioned the way it did, and for the most part, she wished it didn’t. There were things she yearned to forget, painful memories that would never soften with the passage of time. And yet, there were benefits to having a mind that clung to details like ivy to brick.
Recently, she had been using it to assist Detective Inspector Jasper Reid in several of his inquiries. While the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard hadn’t been keen on her assistance, helping Jasper had been natural for her. Most of the time, she’d been involved in his cases one way or another anyhow.
A smile touched her mouth as she thought about the serious, handsome detective inspector. Since his return from Liverpool, where he’d spent four months working to topple a large counterfeiting operation, she and Jasper had been courting. He was busier than ever at the Yard, with a sergeant and three constables at his command and, as usual, stacks of paperwork to be completed for the housebreakings, missing persons, and murders that kept him occupied. So occupied, in fact, that often Leo only saw him once or twice a week, in passing. It wasn’t nearly enough.
She longed for more time with him. Thankfully, they were dining at Roy Lewis’s home that evening. The newly promoted Detective Inspector Lewis had invited them last week, and Leo was looking forward not only to meeting Mrs. Lewis and their two sons, but also to spending more time with Jasper.
Leo rapped her knuckles against the door to the funeral service’s embalming room.
“Enter,” came her uncle’s voice from within.
She pushed open the door and found him standing over a corpse lying on a metal table. Claude’s pale blue eyes, set behind the thick glass of his spectacles, lit with pleasure when he saw her. “Ah! Is it already time for tea?” He checked the clock on a wall and chuckled to himself. “I suppose it is. This is my second one this morning, you know. Poor fellow. Tuberculosis. Give me a few moments.”
Leo joined her uncle at the table. The dead man looked to be in his thirties and showed the usual emaciated chest and limbs, and pale skin of a person afflicted by consumption.
Postmortem examinations were invasive and messy, and they required a lot of physical effort on the part of the coroner. By comparison, the technique of embalming was quite simple. Claude would make incisions in the external carotid artery in the neck and in the femoral artery in the leg, and would insert tubing in each vessel. He’d then inject formalin, a solution of liquid formaldehyde, into the carotid, flushing the blood and gases remaining in the corpse’s vasculature toward the answering incision in the leg. Tubing placed at that endpoint would drain into a hose, which ran along the floor and out an opening in the embalming room’s window. A barrel sat outside, collecting the run-off. Where it went from there, Leo didn’t care to think of. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn the barrels were emptied into the sewer system or the Thames. The last part of the procedure was to fill the cavities of the body with formalin to slow decay and allow the family more time to plan a funeral and viewing.
“Mr. Tate offered his office again,” Leo said, eliciting a smile from her uncle.
“The man can barely peek into this room,” he laughed. “I’m sure he feels rather emasculated that you handle it better.”
Originally, Otto Tate’s younger brother had performed the embalming, but when the younger Tate moved to New York City the previous spring, the elder Tate had been desperate to find another embalmer so that he would not be forced to do it himself.
“There,” Claude said after putting away his brass plunger, a contraption that looked much like a large needle and syringe. “I’ll start on the body cavities after we eat. What have you brought for us today?”
He reached for the basket, but Leo turned away. “Not until you wash your hands—and well, mind you,” she chided. “I’ll meet you in the back.”
There, a cold room, outfitted with a double-hung door that opened wide for corpse deliveries, held a table and a few chairs. It was where they would eat, and today, the hand pies Leo had purchased from a costermonger in Trafalgar Square were still lukewarm. There were, she acknowledged, corpses often stored in this room, but they were at least inside lidded wicker baskets used for collection and transport by Tate’s deliverymen.
