Work Text:
“A little like surgery,” is how Mother once described it. An art like theirs is a meticulous one, requiring a steady hand and a steely heart. It can be unforgiving: mistakes could be smoothed over, reshaped, melted down and born anew, but there was a need for tenacity, efficiency, and for precision even in the most grim of circumstances.
And there were stakes.
Convicts are, traditionally, executed right at the clock strikes twelve. To be clear of the burial procession, Esmeralda arrives with her digger a little after two in the morning.
Body snatchers are a common sight at Lowgate, though detrimental to her work. After all, there will be nothing to sculpt if the Professor is spirited away from her. From behind the shroud of a willow tree, she listens for any indistinct murmurings, for the crunching of grass and gravel underfoot.
From that, she knows there is a man, she can tell, who has gotten to the killer’s fresh grave before she has.
Rarely does it take anything more than lanternlight to ward off a graverobber. And so she peaks past the trunk, finding that lathlike silhouette in the murk and—
And the Professor, rising from the grave.
It all happens so fast. She lurches to action, only for a scream and—
BANG!
A gunshot to ring out. Quickly, she scrabbles back against the trunk, standing right and rigid behind it with her heart in her throat. For some number of minutes, she hears little more than her pulse pounding in her ears. It is only after, when it finally slows, that she can recount to herself the details her panicked mind had pushed to its recesses.
A man, a body-snatcher, had come to exhume the Professor. The Professor had—he had emerged, hadn’t he? London’s most infamous killer, alive. There was a scream. A bullet was fired, but there’d been the sounds of racing footsteps, twigs cracking underfoot. He, that graverobber, must’ve escaped.
But the Professor—
She pokes her head beyond the trunk, but it’s much too dark and much too foggy to make out much. There’s just a bloom of lantern light in the murk, occupied by two dark shapes around the grave—both tall, broad men. Certainly not the long, thin silhouette of before.
She does not know how long it is after the gunshot that they leave. It must be another hour before the sound of footsteps finally recedes. She waits some time after that to ensure the coast is clear before leaving the safety of the willow tree.
There is dirt over the grave, hastily packed. Once they dig enough to find the casket, she swipes her arm out into the dark, finding the handle of her aid’s shovel clutched close to his chest.
“Be on watch,” she instructs. He nods and lowers his spade, turning around as she lowers to the ground.
Her shoulders burn from the weight of her bag. She sets that down and yanks open the drawstring. Inside is the blank armature for the head she prepared earlier—a heavy thing, already covered in a shell of hardened wax—as well as a Primus stove.
Then, she rummages for her skeleton key, jabbing it into the mask-hole and jolting around for the catch. The mask splits in two then falls. Tusspells sets each side gingerly on the grass beside her.
The killer’s face is not a known one to her. He is foreign, clearly. An Easterner—which explains the secrecy of his trial. But it is not his race that disorients her, rather the warmth of his skin in her palms.
It is a confirmation of what she already knows, what she very well had seen. But in spite of herself, she unbuttons the first of his uniform, lifts his neck in her hands to find no fractures in the cartilage, no dislocation of the bones.
There’s a wetness seeping through her clothes, she realizes. Warm, too, dripping down from his limp arm.
Blood, a voice in the back of her mind informs her. She ignores the word and shifts her legs, burying the panic in the process. She is here for a reason, a singular reason. Whatever happened here—whatever that gunshot was—is not her concern.
There is no room for surprise. It is not even a conscious action to dismiss it. Nerves thrum up into her hands like a livewire but she forces them to steady, clinging to what she knows best. Family principles. The metal of her scalpel. The glossy wax between her fingers. After all, time was not on the side of the deceased. It took little time at all for the bodies to become unrecognizable from their former selves, to grow discoloured and misshapen, for all of life’s vibrance to seep away and leave nothing more than a deformed husk.
No, time was not on the side of the living, either.
And so she works, and works, pushing away the fear that his killers will return for her, that her work now will paint a target on her back. It is not her first risky endeavour; it will not be the last.
At dawn she stands, knees burning, her dress covered in a cake of dried blood, and the head of the Professor in her grasp.
—
Two days after that night, the newly-instated Lord Chief Justice arrives at her workshop. That day, she trades her silence for the Professor’s mask.
—
It takes her a week after that to track down the witness from that night. Enoch Drebber. A student—this part, perhaps she should’ve expected—in his twenties. She sends a pageboy to the dormitories. It takes several attempts before she receives any word back. When she eventually does, the message is a simple one: an agreement to meet her.
Drebber arrives, as requested, carrying a small trunk with his clothes and items of that night. The mould is quickly poured. He waits, takes tea silently with her, until the armature cools. Then she guides him into her workshop and twists on the overhead lamp.
Sculpting Drebber is a surprisingly easy process. Live persons could be—and were usually—frustrating subjects to work with. A dead body did not make any sudden movements. The eyes did not flick and their cheeks did not twitch when something tickled or irritated them. Drebber, however, acts just as a corpse. He remains utterly motionless throughout the process, tilting his head when she gestures his jaw, obliges her poking and prodding and repeated thoughtful hums as she carefully maps the scars on his hands, moulds the individual shapes of his teeth.
The expression on his face is blank, almost vacant as he sits for sculpting, one that sharply contrasts the image of him in The Daily Circus. Esmeralda can work with it, of course, that’s not the problem, it’s just—
A little unnerving, she supposes.
“I… must say, monsieur, you seem strangely calm about this debacle.” she says eventually, setting down her caliper. She turns, opens the large armoire behind the workdesk.
“I’d prefer to be done with the matter, is all.” Drebber replies, voice tight. From over her shoulder, she sees his sharp, sidelong glance. “As soon as possible, ideally.”
“I see.”
And from it, she pulls out a number of tied tails of hair hanging on its many hooks. It’s easy to match that long, silky black hair to one in her collection, though when she takes a closer look, she finds a number of white flecks sprouting out from the base of his scalp.
“How old are you, monsieur?”
“Twenty-four.”
“And a student of science, yes?”
“Something of that sort.”
“Why were you there that night?”
“Money. Why else.”
“…I see. Of course.” She doesn’t know why she’s asking. It isn’t like her to try and figure out any more than what is needed for her exhibit. But she can rationalize the impulse, somewhat. It does help build a story after all, to have some reason for his presence, for the ratty clothes he’d been wearing beneath his coat.
It’s not why she asks. But she can rationalize it.
Carefully, she sets down the plaster head on its support. It’s altogether finished: some finishing touches for the whites of his eyes. Some deeper shadows will have to be added for dimension, but the framework is all there. They are finished here. She has gotten what she wanted: models of the Professor and his witness, à la perfection.
Still, her gaze lingers beside the head, to the items Drebber had brought. A camera. A plain shirt and trousers. A white lab coat and black monocle. When she looks up at the man again, the question she’s been trying to tamp down bubbles up once more.
“You saw it, did you not? What ‘appened?”
His blank face darkens almost imperceptibly. If Esmeralda had not been trained to read those minute flickers and furrows of the skin, she is sure she would not have noticed.
“I did not see anything.” Drebber says simply, almost sharply. It is a sudden sharpness, as he stands from the seat and brushes down his trousers. “Now, Miss—” And with a sudden, biting contempt— “Tusspells, am I free to leave?”
Esmeralda’s lips turn into her mouth. She gives him a low nod in response.
“Yes, monsieur. I… appreciate your time.”
“And I appreciate the five pounds. Good day to you.”
—
In the end, it is the construction that is the most nerve-wracking. The physical work itself is just as any other exhibit. It is artistry. A painting, though one not confined to the flat surface of a canvas. It is a diorama of everything she made note of that night; feeling given shape in the dark colours and jagged edges.
But it is different, this time. Something in her gut lurches, tainting the tips of her fingertips as she stipples a sponge along the headstone for texture. She pulls back and finds herself frowning. Something deep and ungraspable within her rejects it, the notion of using such an event and a figure for mere entertainment.
It is bizarre. Esmeralda has never once questioned her family’s work. Their principles have been ingrained in her for as long as she can remember. Not only that, it is illogical; all of the features in their House of Horrors are macabre legends, London’s most infamous murders and murderers made for public viewing. After all, the people want and need something to direct their horror and scorn at, some way of making sense of humanity’s lowest and most grotesque, and it is they who offer it.
So she steels herself through her doubts, threads her needle through the cloth of Barclay’s prison uniform as she stitches the number 137 to his breast. It has never been merely about the lure of the unknown, it has never been just about selling scandal and mystery.
It is not meritless, she reminds herself. It will keep the legend alive. A year, two years, five, ten into the future. And that is what matters most: that these tales are not lost, that the public continues to demand answers.
And perhaps one day, she thinks to herself, they’ll finally get them.