“Hmm?” Iona said, spinning around, knocking an empty plate to the floor. Mercifully, it spun and settled, unbroken.
“No, no, I’ll get it!” Hazel said, seeing Iona begin to reach down to pick it up.
“It’s this blasted belly,” Iona said, rubbing it absentmindedly. “Already the size of a shoulder of mutton. And to think I’m going to get even bigger. How many months you say I have to go now?”
“Four,” Hazel said. “And I’m not going to want you working at Hawthornden much longer, do you hear me? Bed rest soon, especially if the little darling continues to grow at the rate he’s been doing so far. I’m delivering this child, so you’ll do as I say now.”
“Charles says all the babes in his family are hearty types. Come out with full sets of hair and full sets of teeth,” Iona said, depositing herself at the table in the chair next to Hazel and letting out an oof.
“Lord have mercy,” Hazel murmured.
“And,” Iona said, “I’ll work at the house as long as I well like, miss.” She hadn’t even had the child yet, and she was already addressing Hazel like she was a mother, never mind the fact that they were all but the same age. “Who else is going to keep you fed when you’re working late in the night?”
Hazel grimaced. “These hours are only until I finish my treatise. Then I’ll start keeping normal hours.”
“Aye, your treatise.” Iona rolled her eyes and bit into a piece of toast. Hazel had talked of little else for the past few months: her lofty goal of developing a new, updated guidebook on anatomy and basic household treatments, complete with her own illustrations.
The idea was a book of anatomy written in the style of a household manual, the type of book anyone with the ability to read would be able to understand, with diagrams of the human body and its components and advice on home treatments. Dr. Beecham’s Treatise on Anatomy; or, The Prevention and Cure of Modern Diseases was a masterwork in the field, of course; it was the achievement of a lifetime (or several lifetimes, Hazel reminded herself), but it was also a tome thick enough to kill a man if it fell upon him from a high shelf, and nearly impenetrable for anyone without a specific interest in physiology. Hazel’s book would be different—influenced by the manuals for proper etiquette and entertaining that seemed to just appear as if by magic in a young woman’s sitting room as soon as she turned fifteen.
Common people have bodies, Hazel reasoned; there’s no reason they can’t understand how those bodies work. And so many of them cannot afford doctors, or the ones they can afford are charlatans or else poorly trained. Hazel understood with genuine clarity that a straightforward guide to effective home remedies could save lives.
The problem, of course, was that as noble as her intentions were, Hazel had inadvertently begun a staggering undertaking. A book meant to identify common ailments and their treatment could take years if she was thorough, and on top of that, Hazel wanted detailed diagrams and descriptions of the major systems and organs of the body. The drawings of the organs in Beecham’s book were neat as sewing patterns: Hazel had been shocked when the first corpse was opened in front of her and she saw what truly existed beneath our skin, the wet and dark and bleeding mass of flesh. It was frightening to know that that was all we were, that the human soul existed somewhere in that putrid, writhing soup. But it needn’t be frightening. It could be explained, and she could be the one to explain it, with drawings and diagrams and language that read the way people talked.
Since Jack’s trial and hanging, it had become nearly impossible for medical students to get fresh bodies. Hazel was forced to work from old notes, diagrams she had drawn back when she was studying for the Royal Examination. Of course, in the end, she hadn’t taken the test at all. She had followed Dr. Beecham to his surgical hall, watched him attempt to “transplace” an eye from a living patient into another man, and then try to take the beating heart from Jack Currer’s body. She had stopped the doctor, but it wasn’t enough. She hadn’t done enough to save Jack’s life. Jack was gone.
Just thinking of Jack now caused an electric shock to run up from Hazel’s stomach, as though she had swallowed something metallic and alive. She missed him so much she could feel it in her bones, a longing like hunger through every part of her. She missed the way his arms felt around her, the way he smelled, the way the scruff on his cheeks brushed her skin when he kissed her forehead and she just wanted to pull him close, close, closer forever. Jack was gone—he was gone and what good did it do to think of him? He was a hole in her stomach, a longing that she couldn’t fill but whose piercing heat seemed to dull when she worked, when she focused on the task at hand.
Assembling her notes. Reading her notes. Copying her notes so that the handwriting was legible. Identifying the gaps in her study. Slowly, methodically, illustrating the system of veins that delivered blood through each limb: drawings for the arms, the legs, the hands, the feet. In those vast and expansive hours after Iona had brought Hazel her dinner but before she knocked at the laboratory door with breakfast—when the candles were still burning and the only thing that filled Hazel’s mind was rendering the veins that traced their way down the thumb from a preserved hand she had ordered from Paris, in which hardened wax tracked the vessels that once carried blood—Jack might almost have been there, outside, riding a horse or sleeping in Hawthornden, there safe and close enough that she could call him.
From a raging fire that threatened to turn Hazel’s world to ash, the longing instead dampened to a small flame, a flickering candle visible only in the corner of her eyes. You can’t speak to him now, but he’s there if you need him, the candle said. He’s just there, only just out of view. That was the real way she survived losing Jack: by pretending that she hadn’t lost him at all, and that at any moment she might walk up to the big house and see him smiling up at her over tea, see the way his canine teeth extended past the others and overlapped, see his messy hair, which had always contained a hidden pocket of sawdust. Turn Jack from a memory into something that needn’t even concern her—that was the trick. That was the magic she could pull off only when the full power of her focus was entirely on her writing.
Her work was too important to allow for distractions. She knew that to be true, and if she kept repeating it to herself, maybe one day she would just about believe it.
Hazel flipped a broadsheet newspaper on the breakfast table and rubbed the ink between her hands, imagining the cost of the materials and the use of the press that would one day allow her to publish her own book. The ink stained her fingertips black. It was a welcome break from the stains they usually bore—the maroon and brown of dried blood.
Iona gasped and Hazel leapt to her feet. “What is it? Is the baby all right? Are you feeling any cramping or pain?”
Iona was staring at the paper, pointing at a line drawing on the front page. “Is that the Princess? It is! It’s Charlotte! What’s it say, Hazel?”
Hazel sank back into her chair and pulled the page closer to her. Iona could read, but that was a slow and laborious process, and Hazel had long since given up on badgering her to practice. (“Maybe you fine ladies have time to read your novels all day, but some of us have work to do,” she had scoffed once.) Novels did not interest Iona; gossip about the Princess of Wales did, the future Queen of England and only child of the Prince Regent. “It says here,” Hazel said, her heart rate still recovering from her panic moments before, “that Princess Charlotte has chosen to end her engagement with William of Orange.”