Anatomy: A Love Story(19)

Lady Sinnett cut her off with a sad, rueful chuckle. “Nowhere to live. At the mercy of your relatives. At the mercy of your little brother and whomever he deigns to marry. Begging your sister-in-law for scraps of human decency, praying that she’s kind.”

Hazel didn’t know what to say. She just stared down at her lap.

Her mother continued, fingering the edge of her veil. “I realize—I realize that since George left us, I maybe have not been as attentive to you as I might have been. I may not have stressed the importance of your marriage to Bernard Almont, because I assumed you knew it.”

“I do know it.”

“Yes, I thought you did. Smart girl, always reading. Not everyone will be so forgiving of your little—quirks—as your cousin is. The books on natural philosophy you steal away from your father’s study. There will be none of that when we go to London. I guarantee Cecilia Hartwick-Ellis doesn’t dirty her dresses with mud—or ink from books.”

“Only because she doesn’t know how to read,” Hazel mumbled to the glass of the carriage window.

Lady Sinnett sniffed. “Let your fate be on your own head, then. I have given you all the motherly advice I can.”

They spent the rest of the carriage ride in silence. Hazel stared at the dreary darkness through the window and watched the dead branches whip past them as the horses pulled them away from the city and toward home.





9




TWO STAGEHANDS WERE MISSING FOR THE opening performance that night. Jack grumbled as he filled in for them before the show, putting costumes where they belonged, checking the gaslights along the edge of the stage. He liked to be in place by now, high in the rafters, ready to raise the curtain on Mr. Antony’s cue.

Isabella stretched in the wings, her face already powdered, her flowing muslin costume on. She looked beautiful like this, Jack thought, with her yellow hair pulled high on her head and her cheeks rouged. But Jack always thought she looked beautiful. He spent every show in the rafters, up above the stage, watching her—watching the way she seemed to glide through the air like a fish underwater. Effortless. She turned to see him staring at her and smiled at him. Jack smiled back.

“Oi! Lover boy!” Mr. Anthony called out. He was securing a rope and balancing a cigar on his lower lip. “Make sure you get that tree set for Act Two. Carafree ain’t here, so his job is yours now.” He gave a heavy sigh. “You can handle it, right, Jack?” Mr. Anthony had lost an arm fighting the French in the West Indies, and in its place had a limb of leather stuffed with what might have been horsehair coming out at the seams between the false fingers, although Jack had always known better than to ask.

Jack swept his hair out of his eyes. “Course I can. But where is Carafree? And where’s John Nickels? Not like them to not show up.”

“You didn’t hear, you mean?”

“No, course not. Hear what?”

Mr. Anthony glanced around and moved in closer to Jack, turning his back on a group of giggling chorus girls. “Dead.”

“What? Both of them?”

“As doornails. They’re saying it’s the bricklayer’s back again. That it took Carafree before he even felt a fever and John Nickels quicker than that.”

“No,” Jack said quickly. “No, the boys at King’s Arms like to talk and scare each other, is all. I bet Carafree and John Nickels are both on a carriage to Glasgow, laughing their heads off about the gambling debts they’re leaving behind, and I bet they didn’t think a lick about leaving me with all of their extra work.”

Mr. Anthony shrugged. “That’s not what I heard, mate. I heard it’s the fever back again. Took a whole family living at Canongate last month.”

“It’s not the Roman fever,” Jack said confidently. “It couldn’t be. They’d close the theaters. We’d be out of a job.”

Mr. Anthony gave a hearty, miserable laugh that turned into a hacking cough. “Sonny boy, if the fever is back, you and I will have to worry about a lot more than a job.” The dance mistress rang the bell for the start of the show. Jack gave one hopeful glance back at Isabella, in case she was still looking at him, but she was distracted, pulling up her stockings. And so Jack just nodded at Thomas Potter, the lead actor, and climbed the ladder along the back wall to get to the galley above the stage.

The rafters above Le Grand Leon felt to Jack like a great ship—there were the ropes and wooden beams, the thick sails of canvas for painted backdrops, and among them all, dipping and swinging and pulling and releasing, there was Jack. He didn’t know where he had been born—somewhere off Canongate, he imagined—but this place was the closest to home he had known.

A few miserable years were hazy in his memory, years after he ran away from his overworked, overdrinking mother; years of begging on High Street and performing card tricks for the ladies in the Princes Street Gardens and wrestling the other sharp-elbowed boys for the bones thrown away behind the butcher’s shop. He had lived for some time near there with a group of thieves in Fleshmarket Close, where the smell of the curdling blood that ran from the butcher’s down onto the street clung in Jack’s nose during all waking and sleeping hours. Munro had been there, too—a boy a few years older than Jack, who wore fisherman’s pants even to sleep and had a nose broken so many times that what was left on his face was crooked in half a dozen directions. It was Munro who’d first taught Jack to become a resurrection man.