A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake Page B

Brockletower’s Ice-house. Your friend,
Luke Fidelis.

    â€˜Is a reply paid?’ I asked the post fellow, who nodded. I returned to Mrs Marsden’s parlour to scribble a note assuring Luke I
would be at the coffee house at nine. I shall want to know why the Ice-house , I added.
    Having dispatched Luke’s reply I asked William Leather for the key to the Ice-house, which he lifted from a hook-board in the kitchen. I then recruited Isaac Barrowford and Philip Barkworth to carry the body from the stable in which it had, until now, been laid. Hoisting the litter between them, they followed me to the Ice-house, which lay outside the confines of the yard. Here, isolated in the centre of the orchard that stood behind the stable block, on the lower slope of Shot’s Hill, the fruit trees would in summer give it shade. It was a brick building half-buried in the ground and entered down steps and through a passage about five yards long. There was a door at each end of this passage, the inner one being kept closed by a spring, and thickly lagged on the inside with straw.
    The interior was a double-vaulted space, built in brick and dimly lit by two lantern skylights, one at the apex of each vault, which brought not only light but ventilation. There were blocks of ice parcelled in straw and ranged on the ground along the walls. Above these, on slatted racks, were rows of wicker baskets similarly packed with smaller lumps of ice. A work table stood against the far wall. Above it, on hooks driven into the brick wall, hung a variety of hammers, picks, hatchets and saws for breaking, cutting and crushing the ice into cubes, shards, or slush for the making of the desserts that had lately become a fashionable refreshment to the palates of the gentry.
    As we entered, our breath smoked in the cold air. I began manhandling the work table, a solid piece of furniture a good six feet long, into the centre of the space. Barrowford and Barkworth were taking pains behind me as they negotiated the litter down the steps and along the short corridor. There was just enough room. Barkworth in particular was breathing hard.
‘Lay the litter directly on this,’ I told them when I had finished manoeuvring the table.
    â€˜Why is it, Mr Cragg,’ Barkworth panted as they deposited their burden, ‘that the dead’s heavier than the living?’
    â€˜Are they? I don’t know. We must ask Dr Fidelis when he comes.’
    â€˜It’s stone dead she is, and that’s why,’ declared Barrowford, rubbing the sweat off his hands on the front of his smock. ‘And stone’s pulled her soul down to bottom of all.’
    Mr Spectator observes that a noble sentiment, depressed with homely language, is far preferable to a vulgar one, inflated with sound and expression. His subject is tragedy and the stage, but the sentiment applies equally, I believe, to ordinary discourse. However I did not commend Barrowford for his remark in these terms, as I found I could not be quite sure what they had meant. Instead I lifted the edge of the horse blanket that covered the corpse’s face.
    When I had last seen it, that face had been pressed to the ground, so that there was difficulty in viewing it properly. Now I was looking squarely down at the features. The prominent cheekbones were perhaps a little too sharply defined for the purer forms of female beauty, which authorities agree ought to tend towards softness. But this boniness was at least offset by a pair of full lips of which the alluring London actress Mrs Peg Woffington might have been proud. Presumably William Pearson had closed her eyes before loading her onto the cart. I have often noticed how as a general rule the dead body with its eyes closed looks not at all like the person who once inhabited the same flesh, not even like to that person asleep. At any rate I did not at this moment fully recognize Dolores Brockletower, whom I had seen only rarely over the past