“A ripe brat can fetch three quid,” bragged James May, leaning against the rusty iron fence of Bunhill Fields Burial Ground before sunset.

“That’s nothin’,” boasted his companion Richard Wilds. “I get ten for a lady with a child still in her basket.” The much taller Wilds rubbed his belly, which was barely covered by the rags he called clothing.

The gruff men gnawed on stale rye bread they had pilfered in the nearby Whitechapel district of London. They reeked of stale beer and dank graveyard soil, and their tattered leather boots were stained with dried blood.

“You’re both in yer knickers,” mocked Annie Newsom. Redolent of cheap perfume, the barefoot, middle-aged woman wore a filthy gray dress. 

The three rogues sat on the ground behind a copse of trees near the cemetery gates, trying to evade detection. The unkempt graveyard had become the primary burial site for nonconformists and other radical figures unaffiliated with the Church of England or other denominations and was mostly untended. Nettles and chickweed sprouted up between tilted, weathered headstones crowded together in no discernible order. Dried-up, crispy leaves from the previous autumn were ground in the dirt.

“I once got twenty for a hunch’s head!” said Annie.

“And where’d you find one of those?” laughed James skeptically.

“Down by the barber, next to Clissold’s,” she declared.

“You found a dead hunch in Farringdon, just layin’ in the street next to the tavern?” scoffed Richard. “Cock and bull, I say.” 

“No, you arsworm, let me explain,” she jeered, shoving him. “I was feeling chirpin’-merry after a few pints, and I walked out onto my lane. I saw a hunch passin’ by. His head was all shaped wrong, too. It had a funny little knocker on its backside, and his eyes were all stickin’ out this way and that.”

“Right, go on,” said Richard.

“So, this dirty-beau drifted down toward Smithfield Market, and I followed ‘im. He was a real gollumpus, that one. Done stuck a blade in ‘im good and deep. Bugger went down like a hog in a butcher shop. I waited ‘til he bled out, and then I started sawin’ his knob good and off.”

Richard shuddered. “This is a grimy business.”

James squinted up at her. “No one saw you?”

“If they did, they weren’t callin’ for help,” Annie said.

“What about the Nightwatch?” asked James.

“None about.”

“How would ya know?” asked Richard.

“They carry those rick-rack rattles,” she said. “And they tap their staffs hard on the cobblestones, so I heard none approachin’.”

“Runners? Thief-Takers?” asked James.

“That fat constable on Bow Street hadn’t even woken up yet!” she replied. “He’s a snoozy. So, none about. Anyway, I mobbed this bugger’s head clean off. Threw it in me sack, t’was drippin’ blood and guts all down me back. I took his knob straight to Murphy. Couldn’t drag the body, though.”

“Wait just a minute,” James interrupted. “You expectin’ us to believe that no one was in the meat market to see you cutting ‘is head clean off?”

“Not at that hour, that’s what I said!” yelled Annie defensively.

James looked at her skeptically. “How much did you say Murph gave you this time? For the hunch’s crown?”

“I told ye, twenty quid,” she bragged.

“Bollocks!” blurted James.

“I joke not,” she grinned, baring crooked, yellow, and missing teeth and looking down at him. “I was all plump in me pocket after!”

“Me auntie is a silk weaver. She only collects six shillings a week!” lamented James. “She can’t barely eat.”

“Yeah, and I’m here eating stale rye?” Richard threw the crumbs to birds wandering around the headstones. “You’re buyin’ us sackmen supper.”

“Hell no, I spent it all,” she said. “Had to pay me lady, me rent was way past. And I got more I owe. I got nothin’ left! That’s why I’m still here. Murph told me I need to get him another woman up the duff. With a young’n in her belly.”

“You know we ain’t findin’ any of those here,” said James. “And not at Tyburn either. They law’d it so no lady with child may hang by the noose. Makes ‘em real choice.”

“Naw, I know,” said Annie sullenly. “They all make the belly pleas now. These dirty graves are still the best easy pickin’ for the little ones. They can take a little earth bath in their eternity box, and we just raise ‘em right up!”

“We keep hittin’ mortsafes in the best,” he said, spitting. “Like at Saint George’s in Bloomsbury.”

“Mort-whats?” asked Richard.

“Mortsafes!” said James.

“What are you goin’ on about?” asked Annie.

 “Those rich gingerbreads started putting iron bars over the new graves. We can’t get in ‘em!” said James.

“Maybe Tom Thumb here can get in between the little bars. On account of his little stature,” Annie laughed. 

Richard joined her in mocking James.

“Did you know what the good doctor paid me to do last month?” asked James, trying to change the subject from his height.

“No, what?” inquired Richard.

“He paid me to raise two up and leave ‘em in bloody sacks on another one’s doorstep.”

“That piss prophet paid you to do that?” asked Richard skeptically.

“All stinky and smelly from the pox. Anyway, he didn’t want ‘em, but he got a gleam in ‘is eye. He handed me a sixpence and told me to dump ‘em down the way, near another doctor’s shop.”

“Why’d he do that?” asked Annie.

“He offered more than the other one. And his neighbors heard about the school he was runnin’ out of his cellar. They don’t take kindly to these here medical schools. Don’t want to hear that their friends are getting all carved up, even by the good doctors.”

“So, you just left ‘em there to rot and stink?” asked Annie, laughing.

“Hell, I got my shillings. I hear his neighbors done threw a fit. They come out to get their daily bread and find ripe ones waiting for ‘em. Haha!”

“That’s a good laugh. Good way to rake yer competition!” Richard cackled.

“Yeah! They damn near burn’d his school down,” James chortled.

“Now, you remember, we can’t take the shroud, or their rings, nothin’,” instructed Richard.

“Why?” asked James.

“Naples explained it,” he said. “The House of Noodles up there in Westminster law’d it so that we can’t steal a dead body. No one can own a dead body, but if we pinch anything else, anything at all, we get the gibbet.”

“So why are Runners always after us?” Annie asked.

“Because the families pay ‘em to!” exclaimed Richard.

“So, we can nick a body, but not a thing off ‘em?” she asked.

“Right,” said Richard. “No rings or jewelry!”

“Why you workin’ for Murphy, anyway?” asked James. “He takes half your gains.”

“Eh, he gives me rum even when I don’t find any specimens. He’s a good one,” said Annie.

“How many does he collect in a night?” asked Richard.

“With two sackmen, he can raise five or maybe six,” she responded.

“What does he pay for ivories?”

“Teeth are only a shilling or two.”

“Eh, still better off with the whole head,” replied Richard, spitting.

“I got a list of what they lookin’ to buy, but I can’t read. Can you?” asked Annie.

Richard looked down at a scrawled note in Annie’s hand. “I think it says he wants paws, arms, legs, and bellies? Ask Naples. He can read with his one good eye.”

“Shhhhh, look at this one over here,” murmured James, crouching down near the ground. “We need to keep our eyes open for new ones!”

The three surreptitiously observed a grieving family that had followed a minister and two men with a body wrapped in a linen cloth lying in a barrow.

“Eternal rest grant unto your servant Oliver, O Lord,” pontificated a tall minister who was wearing a black cassock, white surplice, and purple chasuble.

“And let perpetual light shine on ‘em too,” replied a barrowman, halting at the pit with the wheeled trolley that carted the body. “I will take it from ‘ere,” he notified the family, who were wailing in sorrow. 

A matron wearing a black dress plucked two coins from her purse. She handed one to the barrowman and one to the minister, who each took a coin. The minister prayed and then ambled back to the nearby parsonage.

The Church’s Sexton Joseph Naples quietly strolled past James, Annie, and Richard, winked, and nodded. Naples’ left eye had been shot out during a wartime battle, leaving a gaping, gruesome hole. He had previously informed them that Oliver was a young boy who had died while young and healthy. His injury from being kicked by a horse was sudden and fatal. The doctors had expressed their preference for such young, healthy specimens, as disease would not have changed the morphology of their human form. Naples had advanced knowledge of all the bodies to be buried in churchyards and potters’ fields and negotiated prices with Mordecai, who usually dealt with the ultimate purchasers.

After a while, the late Oliver’s family also withdrew and grimly walked out of the graveyard. Annie, James, and Richard waited a few hours outside the gates until after nightfall. When they silently crept back in, James was clutching a dirty hemp rope, and Richard gripped a rusty shovel and pickax. Naples joined Annie, standing near the fresh grave.

“Oliver’s perfect,” he said to her. “Mordecai offered me a nice price for ‘im. Not too fat or thin, not too full of juices, and not big-bellied. Tall, too. He has a clubfoot, the good doctors like that! He wore those funny shoes. No wood box to break, either. I made sure they put no lime to rot ‘em.” He looked at Richard, pointing across the filled-in burial mound. “Cut straight across here. And don’t forget to replace the mud and flowers. Keep mum! Don’t let the shovel click against the stones!”

“Right,” replied Richard, cutting into it and clearing the soil away from the area where the head of a casket would have been. Nothing separated them from the corpse but loose dirt and a few pebbles. “I bagged young Oliver already,” he smirked, looking up.

“I made sure we didn’t bury him deep,” Naples boasted. 

James tied and knotted the rope around Oliver’s shoulders. Richard tugged the boy’s freshly buried body out of the shallow grave. 

“This one’ll fetch eight quid!” James exclaimed, as he stabbed Oliver’s forehead with the point of the shovel. Maroon blood oozed out of the wound. “Look, he’s still fresh! Move fast, they don’t keep in the summer wind!”

“You’ll ruin ‘im! The doctors want ‘im untouched!” yelled Annie.

“Damn you!” Naples shouted at James. “What the hell did you do to his face?”

Suddenly, the sharp sound of horseshoes clopping on cobblestones echoed through the tepid, quiet night. They heard the horses snort as their riders pressed them into a full gallop.

“Stand upright and face the King’s justice!” shouted one man on horseback.

“Runners. From that fat bastard on Bow Street!” yelled James, scurrying back behind the tree. “What’s the Constable’s men doin’ all the way up here? Who paid him this time?”

Annie pulled Oliver’s shoes off.

“You’re going to get us hanged!” shouted Richard.

“I only need his body!” shouted Naples. “Take his clothes off and throw ‘im in the sack!”

“No time! We’ll nick him straightaway!” yelled Richard. “Hurry and bring him to the good doctors, my fellow sackmen!” he laughed at the chaos.

Two Runners on horses vigorously pursued Annie out into the cemetery, as she still clutched the boy’s shoes to her chest and scurried down the thoroughfare and down an alleyway.

“What does she hold?” Bond yelled to Charles. “Shoes?”

“What on earth is she clutching the dead’s shoes for?” asked Charles quizzically.

Annie’s zig-zagging path between the gravestones and monuments made it impossible for the Runners to follow her on horseback into the streets. By the time they dismounted, she had escaped out of the rear gate to the alleyways.

Meanwhile, back at the grave, Naples and Richard had yanked the sack into the barrow and made a hasty escape into the cellar of the nearby church. The diminutive James stayed hidden behind large tree roots.

Naples and Richard had rolled the boy’s body down the steep stone stairs and threw the door closed behind them before the Runners could see where they went.

Richard cackled. “Like Jesus in the tomb, Oliver is hereby resurrected!”