Iona looked genuinely heartbroken. “No!” she said. “They were a beautiful couple! And she’s not getting any younger. If she doesn’t have a baby soon, who knows if she’ll even be able to.”
“She’s not much older than us! She’s, what, twenty-one? I think she has plenty of time, Iona.”
Iona rubbed her own belly knowingly. “Less than you think, miss. Does it say why? Was he a philanderer? I bet not. I bet someone else caught her eye. Duke of Gloucester, I reckon.”
Hazel couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say. I think it must have had something to do with her illness. Maybe she wasn’t well enough to travel to Holland. And why, might I add, do you even care? Good Scottish girl that you are, I’ve heard you curse the name of the King and Prince on more than one occasion, when you thought no one could hear you.”
Iona blushed but her expression didn’t otherwise falter. “Aye,” she said loftily. “I can dislike the King and England for all they’ve done to us, and still like the Princess.”
“Whatever you say.”
Everyone did seem to like the Princess; it wasn’t just Iona. All the frustration with and resentment of the monarchy—the pity and revulsion people felt for poor, mad King George and the outright dislike of the buffoonish Prince Regent—dissolved when it came to Princess Charlotte.
“You’ve met her, haven’t you?” Iona asked. She was prompting an anecdote that Hazel had already recounted on more than one occasion but which Iona never seemed to tire of.
“Yes,” Hazel said. “Briefly, when I was in London. Before George died. The last time my mother took me to buy new dresses there. I wasn’t officially out yet, and so I didn’t attend any balls, or any of that sort of thing. But Mercer Elphinstone—a girl from Edinburgh I had spent some time with—she was friends with the Princess. She was hosting a tea, and I met the Princess there.”
“And?” Iona said, exactly as scripted, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“And,” Hazel continued, “I remember her being very beautiful, and very fashionable, and very kind. She was in the high-waisted gowns before the rest of us, and looked marvelous. And she was in drawers, if you can believe it—I remember being able to see the lace edges peeking out from under her dress. Quite scandalous. I recall my mother telling me afterward that she had used the wrong fork for her salad course and I found it so funny I was in fits of giggles all the way back to Edinburgh. That there was a correct fork for salad at all, that the Princess would use the wrong one, and that people like my mother would notice.”
“And yet,” Iona said slyly, “you always have me set the table with correct forks, miss, and you always know the right one to use.”
“Well,” Hazel said, dabbing at her lips with her serviette, “I suppose some things become habit.” It was true, the lessons her mother had drilled into her brain through hours of repetition when she was a child still had their hold on her. After George died, her mother’s etiquette lessons stopped abruptly—her mother had fallen into a deep melancholy, scarcely leaving her room and scarcely talking to Hazel at all for more than a sentence at a time. From that point on, Hazel raised herself, dressing in whatever clothes she could find or chose to have made, educating herself from the books in her father’s library. Her manners, then, were half-formed and strange. She knew most of the proper lessons for a girl of her class, but found that some of the manners had been overwritten, like sentences written over each other on parchment, in the years she spent more or less alone.
Still, she chose the proper riding habit and matching hat to make a house call that morning at one of the fashionable white-stone manors over in Edinburgh’s New Town. Some things, she supposed, just couldn’t be helped.
The ride was short enough, and before the sun had even reached its apex, Hazel trotted onto the stone streets of the New Town. Nearly a century ago, the wealthy had become fed up with the narrow streets and the stink of too many people stacked on top of one another in the city center surrounding Edinburgh Castle. And so, a second city, New Town, had sprung up in neatly manicured squares, rows of manor houses with clean white brick and neo-Grecian columns. The two Edinburghs were separated by Princes Street Gardens. Where there was once a loch thick with sewage and all manner of waste, there were now stretches of elegantly groomed grass, park space in which only those who paid a steep annual fee were allowed to partake, although there was talk of opening it to the public. Hazel liked the idea, and not just because she could imagine how much it would scandalize her mother.
When Hazel began making house calls, she was mostly calling on the working poor in Edinburgh, those who would never be able to afford a private physician and who, in their terror at the possibility of ending up at one of the abysmal poorhouse hospitals, were willing to enlist the young female surgeon of whom they had heard rumors. However, in recent months, Hazel had been making the journey on horseback to New Town more and more frequently.
After Hazel had learned the truth about Dr. Beecham’s medical practice in Edinburgh—that he was making his living by abducting resurrection men and beggars and children to steal body parts for his wealthy clients—he disappeared from the city. From those who didn’t know the truth—and no one knew the truth except for Hazel and Jack—the rumors came fast and freely: The doctor had fallen in love with a woman in Sweden. He had been summoned to treat Tsar Alexander in Russia. He had died while on a ship bound for India.
Hazel did know the truth: if Beecham was immortal, as he claimed, then he could live only so long in a single place without the consistency of his appearance raising questions. He needed to disappear once every generation, reemerging with a new name or, if it had been long enough, with a story about being a previous Beecham’s distant relative, and hoping anyone surviving remembered only a passing resemblance to the doctor they once knew.
There was no telling where he was. He could be anywhere in the world. Finding him would be impossible. Forcing him to face a semblance of justice for the people he had killed, doubly so. For months, Hazel had fantasized about the different things she could have said to Dr. Beecham, the way their final conversation at the Anatomists’ Society could have gone. Was there a combination of words she could have said to unlock his empathy, the way a key opens a door? Could she have persuaded him to face justice? Was there something she could have said to help him understand that what he was doing was cruel, that the physician had no right to sacrifice one human life to benefit someone else?
Thinking about it for too long made Hazel’s stomach knot up in anger. She told herself that the best thing she could do now was help the people in her city.
And now, with Beecham gone, many of his wealthy former patients were left with no one to treat them. Or, at least, no one respectable.
Physicians were easy enough to come by, young men who graduated from the university’s medical school or who came up from London in top hats, bearing pristine leather cases printed with their initials. But surgery was a different animal. Those men—well, surgeons were practically butchers. And they’d sell your secrets for a snuff of tobacco.
Still, in some cases, a butcher was necessary.
Somehow, word had gotten around that Lord Almont’s niece was adept and able to treat common maladies, and that her stitches were small and even and left almost no scar. A female surgeon was, to put it mildly, a curiosity. But if you’re going to invite someone into the private inner rooms of your home, well, it may as well be someone who runs in the proper circles. They might not know how well Hazel was trained in medicine, but they could at least comfort themselves with the fact that she knew the appropriate gloves to wear to the opera. Besides, her reputation was already muddied, and who better to trust with one’s own less-than-savory secrets than someone no one would bother to listen to?