Anatomy: A Love Story(13)

“In a sense,” he answered, looking back at Hazel. His gray eyes seemed to glow in the dark, and though the air was stuffy, Hazel suddenly became cold. “Here, come on.”

They had made their way to the end of the dark passage. The torch on the wall made the boy’s face look strange, all angles and shadows. Hazel could hear voices nearby—murmuring chatter, the melody of a booming baritone—but she couldn’t make out words.

“If you want to see it, the door is here,” he said.

“Aren’t you coming with me?” Hazel asked.

“Nah,” the boy said. “I see enough misery in real life to need to see some doctor do it for applause.” Hazel wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. From the other side of the wall came the sound of a man screaming. Even in the torchlight, Hazel could make out her guide raising his eyebrow as if to say, See?

He opened the door a crack, but Hazel couldn’t see what was on the other side. She hesitated. “It’s a’right,” the boy said. “You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

Hazel nodded and lifted her skirts to slip as quietly as she could past the boy. When their bodies were pressed to each other by the narrow walls, he averted his eyes. Hazel put her hand on the doorknob and gave it a gentle push. The wooden door widened soundlessly, and Hazel realized why the boy had been so certain she would be fine: the door opened beneath the risers that the men were seated on. She was looking through their legs and past their boots, but she had a perfect view of Beecham’s stage, fewer than twenty yards away.

Hazel turned to say thank you, but the boy had already disappeared into the darkness.




From A Primer to the Gentleman’s Field of Physician (1779) by Sir Thomas Murburry:

The difference between the eighteenth-century surgeon and the physician is stark and distinct. A physician may be a gentleman of social standing and considerable means, with access to medical college and a proper education in Latin and the fine arts. It is his role to consult and advise on the matter of all ailments, internal and external, and to provide whatever poultices or medicines may offer relief.

A surgeon, by contrast, is more often a man of lower social status who understands that a genius in the study of anatomy may provide him a pathway to elevated rank. He must be prepared to work with the poor and deformed, the monsters unloved and made gruesome by either war or circumstance.

The physician works with his mind. The surgeon works with his hands, and his brute strength.





6




HE HAD HELPED THE PRETTY GIRL. HE didn’t know why. She was wealthy, the type that should have helped herself. But Jack was there anyway. He had stolen through the back passages of the theater of the Anatomists’ Society more times than he could count. Maybe he felt sorry for her, standing there in the close, looking more alone than was possible, her cheeks flushed pink with either embarrassment or a chill. There had been blood on her glove the last time he saw her, down in the New Town, where the buildings were straight and polished as ha’pennies and grass grew confined to neat little squares. She was out of place here, in the Old Town.

Jack shouldn’t even have been lingering around the Anatomists’ Society that late, that time of morning. He had already made his sale to Straine. Resurrection men were supposed to disappear in sunlight, the vampires who fed the medical students of the city. The delivery took longer than he’d thought it would—Straine had refused to pay the last guinea because the body was a week old. It was, but that wasn’t Jack’s fault. Bodies were harder and harder to come by: the night watchmen were tightening their fists around the kirkyards of Edinburgh. But there was no use haggling with Straine, with his rolling black eye and waxy skin and greasy hair. No wonder the Society designated him as the one to buy corpses; he practically looked like a corpse himself.

Anyway, helping the girl—it was done. It hadn’t taken long, for what that was worth, and Jack wasn’t going to linger. He had already made his sale for the day—in the end, the assistant begrudgingly paid the full price—and the silver jingled happily in his pocket. And now he had to get back to his job at Le Grand Leon—the theater at the heart of the city, where he swept the stage and washed the costumes and built the sets and did whatever else Mr. Anthony asked of him. Tonight, after the evening performance, after Isabella got offstage and wiped off her powdery white makeup, he was going to ask her to go for a pint—and maybe, just maybe, she would say yes.





7




THE SURGICAL THEATER WAS DARK, LIT ONLY by candles surrounding the stage and a few torches sputtering along the walls. The stage was set lower than the seating for the audience to ensure everyone would have a full view of the proceedings. Underneath the lifted benches, cast in shadows, Hazel was all but invisible. Through the smoke and the pairs of impatient legs, Hazel saw Dr. Beecham onstage, selecting a knife from a tray held by a nervous-looking assistant.

Beecham was a handsome man who looked to be in his midforties, with just a streak of gray peppering his blondish hair. The air in the theater was oppressive and stuffy, but he wore a long shirt and jacket with a collar that went up to his chin, and he wore gloves of black leather.

“Apparently he never takes them off,” whispered a man sitting on the bench above Hazel to his fellow beside him. “Never without his gloves.”