After closing the door, Wilde turned to me, a satisfied smile on his face. "Trunkaby will be back quite soon, I am sure. In the meantime—"
"Wilde, take off your jacket," I interrupted, my tone severe.
I had not paid it any particular attention when Wilde had returned, but he had not removed his jacket. Now, however, I saw a dark, sticky-looking spot on the back that had not been there before. "Taking a prurient interest, Doctor Hopps?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow, "Your attention is flattering, but I haven't the time. I really must be off."
As we spoke, I had interposed myself between him and the door. "A professional interest only," I said, "I'll hang propriety and chase after you, should you attempt to leave, but you shall not get far, bleeding as you are."
Wilde's mouth tightened, and I wondered if he would attempt to force his way past. Whether a crippled bunny would be stronger than an injured fox, I could not guess, but I would make the attempt rather than allow him to collapse on the street. We locked eyes for a long moment, but Wilde eventually yielded. "Very well," he said, "But make your examination a short one."
After Wilde straddled one of the chairs at the table so that his back was exposed and then gingerly shrugged off his jacket, the source of the bloodstain was quite obvious. Across the small of his back there were four parallel tears through the fabric of his shirt, underneath which was a bloodied handkerchief. "You were clawed in the back?" I asked, horrified.
I had seen, and treated, more than my fair share of grievous injuries while in the service, but never had I seen one so savage as the result of fighting. Even the occasional scrape between the enlisted mammals had never escalated beyond fists. No well-raised mammal would resort to teeth and claws, which were the province of kits and adults who had never learned the rules of society. Indeed, I myself had been clawed, though not nearly so severely as Wilde, when I was a kit, the perpetrator a young predator who had not mastered his inborn aggression.
"It is generally safer for the attacker," Wilde said dryly, his head twisted round over his shoulder to watch my ministrations.
"It is cowardly. Hold this, please," I said, lifting up the sodden hem of Wilde's shirt and handing it to him.
While Wilde awkwardly held his shirt up, I gently removed the blood-soaked handkerchief and examined his wounds. To my relief, only one of them was deep; the wolf must have caught his back at an angle, so that while the highest claw mark was the most severe, it was also the shortest. The red-orange fur of Wilde's back was matted and tacky with blood, and while I took care with my fingers I could see the pain writ on Wilde's face with every touch. "I shall have to suture," I said.
"Are you quite sure?" he asked, sounding rather disappointed.
"Entirely," I said, "It shall not heal properly otherwise."
He sighed, but did not move. I put on the kettle as I gathered up the tools of my trade, and in short order I was ready. I prepared a solution of five per cent carbolic acid with the hot water, using a portion of it to first wash my paws and the rest to clean away the blood from Wilde's deepest wound. Once I was satisfied with my work, I took a fine silk thread and one of my curved needles and deftly stitched the wound shut. Wilde watched in silence, wincing a little at each poke, until I was finished. "I am not the only one with a talent for needle and thread, I see," he said admiringly.
He made to stand, but I ignored his attempts at flattery. I took him by the shoulder and firmly pushed down. "Not until you allow me to examine your other wounds," I said, somewhat concerned as to what else he might be hiding.
I could sense the impatience all but boiling off my reluctant patient, but he grudgingly pulled his shirt the rest of the way off and allowed it to drop to the floor, where it left a stain on the carpet that never came out. I made the rest of my examination with the rapid efficiency I had learned in the service, and was glad to realize that none of his other injuries were nearly as severe as the wound I had sutured. Wilde's swollen eyelid and the skin around his eye had blackened spectacularly, but the eye itself appeared uninjured and the socket was intact. I could feel a number of contusions underneath the downy fur of his face and the coarser fur of his torso, but nothing felt broken. Without a shirt, he seemed incredibly fragile, as though there was almost no substance to him underneath his fur; there did not seem to be so much as an ounce of fat on his lithe frame. None of Wilde's scrapes were deep enough to require suturing, but I daubed them with a tincture of iodine all the same and wrapped them with linen bandages. The deep cut to his back was the most dangerous should an infection take hold, but I had no reason to believe in the hygiene of the wolves who had attacked him. I had witnessed first-hand that even seemingly insignificant wounds could be fatal if not properly addressed and I would not allow my flatmate to perish of something so trivial, could it be helped.
When at last I announced that my ministrations were complete, Wilde immediately stood. "Thank you, doctor, but I cannot afford to waste any more time."
"You are in no shape to do anything but rest," I protested, "To say nothing of your injuries, you have not slept or eaten at all to-day, have you?"
I took Wilde's silence as a tacit agreement with my assessment. "This case cannot be so important to you as to risk your life solving it," I said.
Wilde paused, a flicker of intense emotion passing across his face, before he spoke. "When you were in the service, if your commanding officer ordered your unit to defend a hill to the last mammal, would you do so?"
"I would," I said promptly.
"If that is so, then why would you question the hill upon which I am willing to sacrifice it all?"
Once again, I was struck with the realization that I understood very little of Wilde's nature. That he would be willing to sacrifice everything for a miserable lemming who cared not a whit for him struck me as some sort of intersection between nobility and foolishness. "If the order came down to hold a hill, I would do my level best to ensure that the other mammals of my unit could fight as long as they could," I said forcefully, "I would take up arms only if no others remained to do so, for that is my role as a surgeon soldier."
"Allow me to help you, if only to be present should you collapse," I added more gently, reaching out to grasp his large paw in my small one.
I was, to tell the truth, exaggerating somewhat in my assessment of the danger that Wilde was in. While he had been sitting and playing the violin, he had put enough pressure on his wound to prevent the worst of the bleeding, and it had already been in the process of clotting when I had examined it. Certainly, it would not have posed any real risk of causing him to perish by bleeding out, as I had first feared might be possible before I saw the source of the bloodstain. However, considering how hard he was pushing his body without food or rest, I did have some concern that he really might collapse.
Wilde gave me a long look as he slowly withdrew his paw from my grasp, and I wished that I could see the thoughts that went on inside his head. "I shall wait no longer than it takes me to change," he said, and retired to his bed-room.
I was willing to accept his terms and made my way to my own bed-room, closing the door and quickly changing out of the tea gown I was wearing. I noticed, with some disappointment, that the fabric had become flecked with my companion's blood, but even if it was ruined I would consider it a small price to pay for ensuring Wilde's continued health. In short order I was in nearly the same outfit I had been wearing when Wilde and I first met, and I was un-surprised to be out of my bed-room well ahead of him. Considering Wilde's injuries, changing his clothes must have been a laborious task indeed, and I took the time that I had to ensure that my service revolver was in fine working order and safely stowed in my pocket. At last, however, he was prepared, far more freshly dressed, and we left the suite together, Wilde hailing a hansom.
"The corner of Mustelid and Eighth Street, as quick as you please," Wilde ordered the cab driver.
When we were in the back of the hansom, sitting opposite each other, Wilde spoke again. "Trunkaby will be at her futile little interrogation for at least an hour or so, before Waldheim yields or she realizes that she is on entirely the wrong trail. If she takes the most reasonable course of action for a mammal in her position, she will consider how the lock box had its lock defeated; I would daresay that she shall ask Mr. Goredian's company to assist the police."
"You sound skeptical that she shall get any results, from either course of action," I observed.
"The impossible may be eliminated from consideration with no further thought," Wilde said, "Consider the sequence of events that must have occurred for Trunkaby's theory to be correct. First, neither a single rat nor an army of them could throw a cobblestone through a window, lest they had a trebuchet."
There was, of course, an obvious counterpoint, but Wilde continued before I could speak it, "They could have had a larger mammal as an accomplice, but that only raises more questions than it answers. While Trunkaby is quite correct that a clever and determined group of rats could evade detection by the guards—dullards to the mammal, I would say—how could they open the vault? The door swings on its hinges freely enough while it is open, but there is no means of obtaining leverage while it is closed that they could employ undetected; the door is simply sized for too large a mammal compared to a rat. The truly ridiculous nature of Trunkaby's theory, however, begins with her claim that the army of rats squeezed through a knothole and then opened the lock box. Even should they somehow exhibit strength far in excess of any rat to ever live and get the lid open inside the crate after defeating the lock, the gold could not be transported intact. A bar of bullion is the size of a brick and weighs at least twice what you do; no rat could carry one, nor get it through a knothole if they could."
"The gold with which Mr. Waldheim was caught was not in the form of bullion," I objected, "Could it not have been divided into more manageable pieces before it was removed?"
"There were no signs of it in the lock box or on the remains of the crate," Wilde, "Even a methodical thief would have left behind a bit of gold dust, no matter how much care they took. Besides, Waldheim's gold did not come from the bank."
"I thought we were venturing to the pawnshop Trunkaby referenced to determine how Mr. Waldheim came by his gold," I said, not understanding the purpose of our trip.
Wilde had not directly stated our destination, but it seemed a reasonable conclusion. My companion shook his head. "Half marks, Dr. Hopps. While we are going to Weaselton's pawnshop, there is no need to determine how Waldheim came by his gold; this I already know."
"How the devil did you deduce that?" I cried.
Wilde settled back in his seat, his expression quite smug. "It was simplicity itself. Gold bullion is, as a rule, twenty-four karats, while more than half the little bits of gold Trunkaby showed were no more than sixteen karats, and one could not have been more than ten. The sole piece of gold in her little exhibit that was twenty-four karats was unmistakably gold foil, folded on itself many times."
"You were able to tell all that from a glance?" I asked, rather impressed.
Certainly, I would not have been able to distinguish different alloys of gold from each other, let alone with the kind of precision Wilde seemed to be claiming. "The luster is unmistakable, with sufficient practice," he said, "Considering Waldheim's appearance, it was trivial to determine the source of his gold. Had he been born seventy or eighty years earlier, he would doubtlessly have been one of the scavengers after the Battle of Waterloon."
As a former officer, I was well up enough on my military history to realize what Wilde was implying. "His gold came from the dental fillings of corpses?" I asked, disgusted.
"There can be no doubt," Wilde said, "In addition to explaining the rather irregular nature of the pieces, it also neatly explains his appearance. He was, as you no doubt noted, filthy from head to toe."
I had noticed, but it had meant nothing more to me than that Waldheim was in need of a thorough scrubbing. "The mixture of stains from the darker, black dirt closest to the surface and the blue-gray of Zootopian Clay deeper down tells me that Waldheim was burrowing into graves at a not insignificant depth, most likely near to the harbor where the clay is closest to the surface. The cemetery at St. Ninian's Church can be entirely ruled out, as while it is in the correct location, rodent-scale burials do not take place at a sufficient depth to strike clay and none of the mammals interred there would have fillings nearly so large as what Trunkaby showed. I would say that All Saints' Cemetery is the most likely spot where Waldheim did his nasty business, almost certainly at fresh plots where the soil was still quite loose and well mixed."
If Wilde was correct, and I had little reason to suspect that he was not, grave robbing would also go a long ways in explaining Waldheim's reluctance to confess where the gold had come from, for it was a serious crime indeed. "That is a rather clever conclusion," I said, "But why then are we headed for this Weaselton's pawnshop?"
"What do you know of fencing?" Wilde asked in response.
I frowned. Due to my experience on the family farm and in the service, I had some experience at both types, though neither seemed particularly relevant to the situation at hand. "I am rather better at putting up fences than swordplay," I confessed, and was puzzled when Wilde broke into a fit of laughter that ended with him clutching at where I had stitched him up and wincing in pain.
I started to move from my seat opposite my companion to examine how my handiwork had held up, but he motioned me to stay where I was as he recovered.
"You are not experienced with criminals, I see," he said, smiling, "Weaselton is a fence, or a receiver of thieves; that is, he purchases stolen goods for a pittance and resells them for a considerable profit."
I felt my ears redden in embarrassment that Wilde had caught out my naïvety,and while he did not seem inclined to tease any further I have no doubt that his sharp eyes had seen my reaction. "An honest mammal such as yourself should take pride in your ignorance of theives' cant," he said, and I was grateful to allow the topic to drop, though I had cause once more to wonder at the means by which Wilde came by his knowledge.
When we disembarked from the hansom, I understood why Wilde had directed the driver to an intersection. While Eighth Street was a proper street, wide enough to permit many carriages in motion in both directions, Mustelid Street was scarcely wider than an alleyway, and our carriage could no more have traveled down it than a camel could fit through the eye of a needle. Indeed, I imagined that Inspector Trunkaby might nearly have had to turn sideways to navigate the twisting and meandering path while en route to the pawnshop.
On our way down Mustelid Street, carefully side-stepping dubious puddles and bits of rotting refuse, Wilde stopped at an alley that made the street seem luxuriously wide where a little waif of a ferret kit was selling matches. She held up four bundles with one paw and raised a single finger on the other, and Wilde clearly understood her meaning for he gave her a penny in exchange for the proffered four bundles. She stood and gave him a little curtsy of her filthy dress as she accepted his coin, then sat back down on the cobblestones of the alley. "Is Weaselton still in his shop, then?" Wilde asked as he pocketed the matches.
The ferret nodded mutely, still having said not so much as a word. Wilde doffed his hat, then bent over and pressed a halfpenny into her palm. "My thanks, Molly," he said, and she smiled up at him with a mouthful of sharp teeth that gleamed a pearly white out of the gloomy shadow of her alley.
Once we were out of earshot, I looked up at Wilde. "One of Finn's urchins, then?"
"Indeed," Wilde said, "An actual kit, unlike him."
My recollection of Finn brought to mind something that I had quite ignored at the time, my attention having been solely consumed by Wilde's injuries upon his return. "Whatever did Finn mean?" I asked.
My companion looked down at me, a bemused expression on his face. "He meant to injure me further, should I not pay him more than we had previously agreed."
I had no doubt that Wilde was being deliberately obtuse. "I understood his meaning there well enough," I said, "But what did he mean when he said there was talk?"
Wilde stopped walking, and I followed suit. "The wolves who caused my injuries did not have so much as a kind word to say of Garou," he said, turning to face me.
It seemed to me like a complete non sequitur, to change topics from Finn to the wolf who acted as Mr. Lemming's primary servant, but I did not speak, waiting for Wilde to elaborate. "They think Garou is Mr. Lemming's dog, tamed and thoughtlessly obedient. They felt diminished, you understand, to be lower than even so meagerly ranked a wolf."
I could not claim to be anything like an expert on wolves, though there had been enough of them in the army for me to know that they would consider it a serious insult indeed to be called a dog. "Yours is not the only reputation that may suffer from our cohabitation, Dr. Hopps," he said, "There are those predators for whom there is nothing lower than serving prey."
"It should be plainly obvious that you are not my servant," I protested, "Besides, that is absurd. Predators are outnumbered by prey ten to one; it is only the natural order of things that so too shall prey hold power."
Wilde made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. "Who am I to argue with the natural order?" he said, turning to continue down the street, "Come along, our destination is just ahead."
Three tarnished brass balls, the traditional symbol of a pawnbroker, hung off a wrought iron post above a grimy and dusty window displaying a variety of goods, from a silk top hat a bit too large for a bunny to a golden pocket watch to a silver mouth organ. Peeling gilt letters upon the glass proclaimed, "Weaselton's Pawn and Sundry," and I knew we had reached our destination. I pulled open the door and walked in, a bell announcing our presence.
Author's Notes: The description of medical care in this chapter is, to the best of my ability, an accurate description of care provided by a good doctor in the late 19th century. The importance of hand washing in medicine was known since 1847, when Ignaz Semmelweis made the connection between high infant mortality rates and physicians not washing their hands between dissecting corpses and delivering babies. Unfortunately, Semmelweis's ideas flew in the face of the medical establishment and he also had an abrasive personality, which resulted in his work largely being ignored until the father of modern surgery, Joseph Lister (also the inventor of Listerine), in 1865 published his own work. With the germ theory of infection more developed at that time, Lister's techniques became widespread, while Semmelweis died that same year of an infection following a beating administered by the guards of the asylum he had been committed to. Carbolic acid was Lister's disinfectant of choice, and worked quite well, as did tinctures of iodine, which is basically iodine and alcohol. Disinfectants were particularly important considering that antibiotics did not become available until 1942, and an infection could easily be a death sentence. Silk made the most sense to me as the material for a suture, as the other widely used material in the 19th century—catgut—wouldn't make sense for the setting. I thought that it made sense for Dr. Hopps to be on the forefront of medical practice, as I don't think it fits her character well to be one of the old-guard establishment doctors who were highly resistant to the advances in medicine made during the Victorian era.
Dr. Hopps's comment about hanging propriety by chasing after Wilde if she has to may not make much sense to our modern sensibilities, but it does within the context of the Victorian setting. Although the tea gown that she was wearing is perfectly modest by our standards (it's essentially a European interpretation of a kimono), in the time period they were only appropriate to wear within the home, not out on the street. There's not quite a modern equivalent, but it'd be a bit like wearing pajama pants. As I was personally reminded this past week, unless you're on a college campus wearing them outside in public isn't going to be considered exactly proper, even though they're not at all revealing.
There's some more detail in this chapter about the gold. Banks use bars of bullion, which in the modern era are typically sized at 11 to 13 kilograms, or about 24 to 28 pounds. There may have been more variation in the past, but I'm using that as the estimated weight of each bar of gold in this case. Considering that in chapter 1 I referenced 4 pounds (a bit under 2 kilograms) as almost a third of Dr. Hopp's weight prior to her illness, she probably wouldn't be able to lift one, to say nothing of a rat that's considerably smaller. It's also true that gold bars are 24K, meaning that they are essentially pure gold, rather than alloys; 18K gold is 18 parts gold, 6 parts other metal (out of 24 parts), and so on for lower numbers.
The reference to scavengers after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 is true to history; there were people who looted the corpses of the soldiers, and teeth were taken in addition to any other valuables, but the primary goal wasn't to get precious metals from fillings. Instead, the teeth were taken for use in dentures, and up through at least the 1850s there was still some demand for donor teeth in making dentures. By 1881, when this story is set, England had passed laws that prevented just anyone from calling themselves a dentist and providing dental services and advancements in processing rubber and porcelain meant that dentures didn't use real teeth anymore. The best fillings from this time period would have been 24K gold foil, carefully manipulated and worked over to precisely fill the hole left by drilling out the decaying portion of the tooth. However, dentists would also use other cheaper materials, from gold alloys that worked nearly as well as gold foil to materials that didn't, including tin and lead.
Zootopian Clay is a reference to London Clay, which really is a bluish-gray clay found under London and was used in brick-making for decades. St. Ninian's Church is a reference to the church of the same name from the Redwall series, while All Saints' Cemetery is a real cemetery in London that opened in 1840 and was still having burials take place in the 1880s.