Anatomy: A Love Story(11)

That morning she had continued to plan it out in her mind, step by step, while spooning porridge into her mouth across the wide oak table from her mother. Their informal dining room was perhaps the only room at Hawthornden that could be called “cozy.” It was next to the kitchen and always warm, and usually smelled pleasantly of whatever meat Cook was roasting for dinner that evening. Though the walls of the house in nearly every other room were covered—with dim oil portraits and metal weapons and specimens from her father’s travels kept safe behind glass—here the wood was bare, an inviting chestnut color lit by the crackling fire warming the kettle in the hearth.

If only Bernard hadn’t ripped up the advert. Not that Hazel didn’t have it memorized, but it would have been a comfort to be able to read it, and to reread it. The poster hadn’t indicated that women wouldn’t be allowed at the anatomical lecture, but it didn’t have to. Besides, Hazel didn’t want anyone there recognizing her and reporting back to her mother—or, heaven forbid, her uncle. No, instead she would wait until the bells at Saint Giles’ Cathedral rang eight o’clock, when the lecture was starting, and hang around outside until the doors were closed. Then, when everyone was distracted by whatever miraculous new technique Dr. Beecham was demonstrating, she could slip in, silent and undetected.

Of course, the Dr. Beecham, the one whose textbook redefined the field of anatomy and who had turned Edinburgh into the world capital for medical sciences, had been dead for some time. It was his grandson, Dr. Beecham III, who now served as head of the Royal Edinburgh Anatomists’ Society.

Hazel silently repeated the plan over and over, like a chant: Horse, town, lecture. Horse, town, lecture. If she rode back hard, she would make supper, and she could pretend she’d lost track of time in the woods. Her mother wouldn’t notice; she scarcely noticed Hazel at all. George was dead and Percy was the heir. What did it matter what Hazel did with her time?

“Thank goodness we’re going to London for the Season.”

Hazel was so distracted by her own thoughts that the sound of her mother’s voice shocked her like a bolt of electricity. “I’m sorry, what?”

Lady Sinnett straightened her spine, and the veil she always wore over her face quivered. “To London,” she repeated sharply. “For the Season. Don’t be tiresome, Hazel.”

“Yes, of course. London.” A miserable few months of being trussed up like a Christmas turkey and made to smile at glossy-eyed strangers and shoved onto Bernard’s arm.

“Thank goodness we’re going,” Lady Sinnett repeated, “given everything I’ve been hearing.”

Hazel tried to keep her voice steady. “What have you been hearing?” Her breath tightened in her chest. So her mother knew. Knew about the lecture and the anatomical school. Of course. How could she have possibly thought to keep it hidden when—?

“The fever, Hazel,” Lady Sinnett sputtered. “Obviously not where any civilized people are, but up in Edinburgh, where the buildings are on top of one another and the poor are half dead anyway—all the bad air in Edinburgh, honestly, the sooner we get to London, the better. Especially with Percy’s delicate constitution.”

“Oh. Yes. Right.” The bells from the abbey across the field rang out the hour, and Cook swept into the dining hall to take away their plates. “I’m going to take a walk this morning,” Hazel said, breaking the silence again. “A good, long walk. To get all of the good air.”

From somewhere above them came the sound of Percy pounding arrhythmically on the pianoforte. “Yes, fine,” Lady Sinnett said distractedly. Hazel took another sip of tea so her mother wouldn’t see her grin.



* * *



THE RIDE TO EDINBURGH TOOK LESS THAN AN hour, and no one was on the road except half a dozen farmers whom Hazel didn’t recognize and who didn’t bother to look up at her as she sped past. She just followed the main road toward the shimmering black smoke, visible for miles—Auld Reekie, the beating heart of science and literature in Scotland. Before Hazel’s father left, he had taken her and George to Almont House to listen to Sir Walter Scott do a reading from his narrative poem Lady of the Lake. The Roman fever had taken George less than a season later. Hazel had been sick, too, clutching her blankets and soaking her bedding with her sweat and the blood from the sores on her back. And then, one morning, with the dim yellow light of dawn across her window, she found she could sit up. Cook had wept when Hazel asked for porridge, the first food she’d requested in a week. She had survived, and her older brother, who had been stronger and smarter and braver than she, had died.

Hazel knew the Old Town was a maze of twisting streets. Even remembering what the front door of the Anatomists’ Society looked like, Hazel still silently rehearsed the way she might politely stop a stranger and ask him for directions. But almost as soon as she deposited her horse at an inn and started walking along the cobblestones on foot, she picked out a pair of anatomy students in the crowd. They couldn’t be anything else: threadbare black coats, stained shoes, and, most tellingly of all, copies of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise clutched under their arms. Perfect.

Hazel followed them on foot over the rain-dappled stones until they dipped into an alley near South Bridge that reeked of day-old fish. The alley released into a close—a tight square surrounded on all sides by buildings at least three or four stories high. The buildings all seemed to tilt forward. The sky had been blue and expansive as Hazel rode to town, but here it was just a distant pocket square–sized patch of dishwater gray. Laundry and the smell of urine hung in the air.