My Dearest Josephine

by Peter Gifford

My dearest Josephine,

I know it has been too long since I last wrote. I can only hope that when you hear the story of the last months you will find it in my heart to forgive me for what I have done and alas, what I have yet to do. Remember alwatys, my dear one, that despite all that I have endured, your lovely face has been foremost in my imagining, during all the fevered days and the long, horrible nights.

I seem to remember, though now it seems so long past, that I last wrote In February, not long after the beginning of second term here at St Josephs. My medical studies had been progressing well, and I confidently looked forward to a successful year. The men here had been friendly and helpful, even those in higher years who looked down on us young upstarts with grave wisdom of a year’s experience. In fact, some of the second year students took extra care to provide tutelage for us beginners. In this way, one day as I poured through dusty Roman tomes in the Great Library, did I meet Sebastian.

I had heard rumours about Sebastian Drake since my first days at the University, of course. He was considered quite a leader of men despite his youthful years, an impression reinforced by the confident way he strode the stone courtyards, his robes billowing out behind him like a vengeful stormcloud. Around him gathered a like-minded group of friends, or perhaps sycophants, with whom he conducted weekly meetings on Thursday nights in the lecture theatre. It was said that he pursued his own line of research, and that on these nights he would forcefully put forth his theories, gesturing wildly and stepping back and forth across the small space of the while the white faces of his followers floated attentively in the darkness above and around him. Others, more vindictive, said he conducted, against school regulaations, private dissections during these nights, using corpses supplied to him by a paarade of nefariouss characters with whom he had dealings on the edges of the grounds. Regardless of the truth, he was a man not lightly to be ignored, especiaally when he chose to turn the twin beams of his piercing gaze upon you.

“You are Walsingham, correct?” he said to me without preamble that day in the library. I looked up from the treatise on the essential humours of the body that I had been studying and indictated that this was, indeed, correct.

There was a pause as the man seemed to study me, to take the balance of my worth on some personal scale agaainst who knows what weight.

“Thursday night, the lecture hall, three hours after curfew.” he said finally. Without a word more he turned on his heel and I found myself staring blankly at his retreating back.

Of course, my darling, I aappeared at the appointed time. You might ask yourself, safe at your father’s house, perhaps with the cheery rays of the sun streaming through the parlour window, why I would answer such a perfunctory and illegal summons. Surely all I had worked for was at risk by breaking University rules without good reason. I can only reply that the qualities you admire in me have aside perhaaps more steeped in shadow than iss readily apparent. That thirst for knowledge that you so admire in your dear one, the desire to learn all it is I can to become one day the greatest of medical practioners in the land, and thuss ease the suffering of hundreds and shine the light of knowledge into so many dark and dread places; indeed, the thirst can sometimes, like the starving man’s desire for less than savoury bread, bring me to devour all that is on offer. For Drake promised something more than the usual stale diet of lessons and lectures, books and rote learning; he held out the possibility of explorations beyond those of the dusty professors who handed down the pronouncements of the classical ancients like tiny precious morsels, one by one and each not before the other. As ever, my impatience haas become my undoing. I could not wait to learn at the same rate as others had learnt, but instead must leap ahead into the abyss. Or perhaps be pushed.

So it will be no suprise to you to learn that I was there, sitting in darkness one of the highest rows of the theatre, that Thursday night. None there spoke to each other, but like members of some dark cult filed in alone in silence and took their places apart, looking not each other but to the candlelit space like men gazing down into a well. There, in the flickering yellowish light, was the stone slab that dominated the space, and upon that slab a white sheet, covering a shape that could only be a human body. All of the young, softly glowing faces fixated on the shape, until it seemed by a trick of the light that it floated above the slab, or perhaps there was some movement there, or a breath taken; and then the eyes would widen, and blink, and there as before was only the candlelight, and the sheet, and the shape under it.

For some time we sat, perhaps twelve of us, huddled black shapes clinging to the anonymity of the shadows. Until finally a door opened and Drake entered, to stand behind the shape on the slab with his eyes cast down upon it. He carried a small leather bag, which he placed before him with a sound of metallic objects shifting, then he looked up at us for a long moment, moving his cold gaze from white face to white face, but acknowledging no one.

“Why are we here Gentlemen?” he began, in the softest of voices, almost a whisper. “Why have we come to these venerable halls, why do we bury our heads in old books and listen to to the words of old men? Do we wish to become like them, old crows sitting on a pile of books and sqawking at the hands that come too close?”

He moved to the front of the slab suddenly his eyes met mine, though I could have been no more than a dark blur there at the top of the ranks of benches.

“That maay be the petty ambition of some who come here, but we have come to know. We are here to learn, of course, but it iss not the learning that drives us, it is the desire to take that learning and add to it, to go beyond what has been dictated, parrot-fashion, over hundreds of years and actually understand the workings of life itself.” His voice had risen impercetibily, and now he began speaking in a hoarse voice which rose up like intoxicating gas to the listeners above him.

“Yes Gentlemen, life itself. For is that not what we came here to know, to understand, to control? Not for us the role of fragile dams, attempting to stem the endless tides of death and disease that flow over the human race. Instead we strive to direct the flow, and armed with a deep knowledge of concepts unknown to the mass humankind, emerge triumphant from the attacks of pestilence, to battle the four horsemen themselves and drive them back, to direct the very flow of life itself!”