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sick. I’ve been working for you.”
    Why does his temperature drop ten degrees when she stands near him? Why does he feel infected by her, fluish, why do his teeth chatter? It used to be when he was in love he felt this way. Then, when he stood before the uncharted universe of his first opened body. Inept, hopeful, terrified. Like he felt a month ago, in the Labour in Vain, when drunk and floating on laudanum he poured out his soul to this girl; confessed his needs, his fear, his failure at the Trinity graveyard. They must have bodies, he told her. My teachers—Sir Asdey, Knox—they provided bodies. I am afraid. Did he say it out loud? I am afraid.
    “Who is Miss Place?” she asks.
    “Gustine, go home,” he says, a little sickened to hear his fiancee’s name in her mouth. He knows he shouldn’t be angry at her. She is only doing what he, in a moment of insane weakness, asked her to do. But he is embarrassed by her. She has no idea what it is she’s doing.
    “Dr. Oliver.”
    He hears her calling his name, but walks back inside. Did anyone overhear what they were saying? He looks around suspiciously, but the only person he sees regarding him is a hideous one-eyed woman standing by the bar. Someone did a bad job sewing that up, he thinks. Back at his table, four oblivious boys slouch in their chairs, their long legs imperiously stretched out before them. Four boys from among the best families in Sunderland, friends of his uncle Clanny’s, paying students. Here in this out-of-the-way town where he was to forget everything that happened in Edinburgh, where he was to begin again. With his own school. Under his own control. But he has taught them everything he can from charts. He has exhausted the illustrations from Albinus and Bichat. And he has seen firsthand the dangers of allowing a surgeon to operate when all he knows of the human body is the space it takes up in a book. Back in London his teacher’s nephew, Bransby Cooper, was admitted into the Royal College of Surgeons with no better qualification than a kinship to Sir Astley. Henry witnessed him perform what should have been a routine bladder stone removal on a middle-aged man, the father of six children—a procedure any trained surgeon could perform in under eight minutes. Bransby took an hour, digging with his knife, then his clamp, finally groping with his fingers like a grocer fishing for olives. The patient, fully awake the entire time, bound, and screaming in agony, was so exhausted he died twenty-four hours later. Six children. Could he live with himself if he graduated four more Bransby Coopers?
    Behind him, Gustine waits. She has someone for him. A drunk and a bully. Dead under a dark bridge. Who is to know? Burke is dead. Hare gave King’s evidence and was transported. It is not the same, he tells himself. We have murdered no one.
    “Dr. Chiver.” Gustine comes up behind him. “I lost money coming to find you. My landlord is going to be mad.”
    And Gustine’s landlord is going to be mad if he doesn’t give her some money. There is no way around it. His students are slouching, again pretending to read their papers, but about to mutiny. Our teacher is afraid, he knows they are thinking. He is afraid to get us a body.
    “Did you hear me?” she asks.
    Henry strides to the table in the back and Coombs, who had taken his seat, jumps up. Henry knows they are wondering about the woman in the fancy blue dress. He can see the unasked question hovering on Coombs’s lips like a smirk. He won’t give him a chance to ask it.
    “Be at my house in two hours,” he says. “Sleep, eat, do whatever you need to do. Tonight, we will have a lesson.”
    It is midnight, and the Labour in Vain is closing up. John Robinson wipes the sticky beer from the tables with his fusty rag, sweeping the rain-soaked sawdust onto the street to clog up the gutters. He has blown out all the lamps but one to save on oil, leaving the public house shadowy and cold, robbed of the