Anatomy: A Love Story(25)

“You have all been given a rabbit,” Beecham said. “I have taken the liberty of doing the killing for you. The term starts with anatomy, but until more men start breaking His Majesty’s laws, human subjects are in limited supply, to say nothing of their considerable price. And so, for your first day: rabbit. Your task will be identifying and articulating the major organs: brain, heart, stomach, lungs, bladder, liver, spleen, large intestine, small intestine.” He wrote the name of each body part in chalk on the board behind him and underlined it.

Hazel looked down at her rabbit, a thin wiry thing with mottled brown fur. The smell of it reminded her of the kitchens after her father and George went hunting. She looked up again to see Dr. Beecham impatient and expectant. “What are you waiting for?” he said to the class. “Begin!”

The scramble started immediately, as the boys around Hazel slashed their knives into their animals and began to hack away at the innards. Hazel paused a moment and examined the animal in front of her. She waited to lift her knife until she could perfectly picture all the slices she would make—as few as possible. And then Hazel cut.



* * *



“FINISHED. I MEAN: FINISHED, SIR.” A few of the boys near Hazel lifted their heads in disbelief. They were covered in sweat.

Dr. Beecham looked up from the newspaper he was reading at his desk at the front of the room.

“All the organs,” he said. “Not just the first one on the board.”

“I know, sir. I’ve got them all.”

Beecham rose and walked slowly over to Hazel’s table, where she had neatly removed all the requisite organs and placed them in organized rows next to the now disemboweled rabbit. “Brain, heart, stomach, lungs, bladder, liver, spleen, large intestine, small intestine,” Hazel recited, pointing them out one by one.

Beecham blinked a few times in disbelief. “What’s your name, young man?”

Hazel’s mouth went dry. “George. George Hazelton, sir.”

“Hazleton. Hazleton, don’t believe I know the name. Is your father a physician?”

“No, sir. He serves in the Royal Navy. But he had an interest in natural philosophy, and I studied his books.”

“His books.”

“Yes. Actually, I’ve learned the most from your grandfather’s book. Dr. Beecham’s Treatise.”

Dr. Beecham smiled. “I’m well familiar. You couldn’t have found a better primer. Class, drop your scalpels. Mr. Hazelton has outdone you all.” He leaned in to examine what remained of Hazel’s rabbit. “I say, in the years I have taught this course, not a single student has ever managed to cut so cleanly and swiftly. Bravo.”

A boy behind Hazel coughed loudly. “Bootlicker,” he coughed again. The boys around him laughed. Hazel had spent enough time with her brothers to know what he meant: she was sucking up to the teacher. The cougher had several large moles prominently placed on his face, and long sideburns perhaps meant to draw the eye away.

“That’s quite enough, Mr. Thrupp.”

Thrupp rolled his eyes as Dr. Beecham made his way back to the front of the classroom.

“Now, what’s say we all get caught up to where Mr. Hazelton already is,” Beecham said, beginning to draw a diagram of a flayed rabbit on the chalkboard.

Hazel felt something wet and cold hit the back of her neck.

A rabbit heart, which landed on the floor behind her, still leaking blood. Thrupp’s cronies laughed and Thrupp smirked at her, and Hazel felt a slimy wetness drip from her neck down into her shirt.

Her cheeks burned, but Hazel forced herself not to break eye contact with that boy as she reached down and picked his rabbit heart off the floor. Looking straight at him, she brought the rabbit heart up and squeezed it, hard, in her first.

The laughing stopped, and Hazel turned back to listen to the rest of Dr. Beecham’s lecture, too pleased with herself even to care about the unpleasant squelching of the blood and viscus between her fingers for the rest of the afternoon.




7 October 1817

No. 2 Henry Street

Bath

My dear Hazel,

After a nightmarishly long journey—awful, the weather, just awful—we arrived in Bath. The air already suits Percy, but I’ll get him into the natural hot springs straightaway as a preventative measure. Who knows what terrible diseases he might have picked up from the bad airs on our travels? We shall be here for several months and then head to the London apartment, where I hope you will meet us. I’ve told Lord Almont that I expect Bernard to propose within the year, so do try to arrive in London engaged if you can.

—Your mother, Lady Lavinia Sinnett

P.S. I hope your condition has improved. Do write if anything takes a turn for the worse.





12




THE WEEKS PASSED FOR HAZEL IN A HEADY daze. Though her childhood afternoons spent on the floor of her father’s study memorizing his old copy of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise had given her a leg up on the other students initially, it soon became obvious that she would need to absorb everything she could in class if she hoped to pass the Physician’s Exams at the end of term.

She took notes as quickly as she could to keep up with the pace of Dr. Beecham’s lectures, which jumped from the lymphatic system to skeletal structure to the use of leeches in modern bloodletting; he reminded them not infrequently that the class would only be getting more difficult, especially once they started to watch human dissections. That was the real heart of the course, what students paid the fees for: the chance to see a professional efficiently autopsy a body. Whether the bodies were procured from public hangings or resurrectionists, Hazel wasn’t sure. George had been buried in the family kirkyard outside Hawthornden, so Hazel’s family never had to concern themselves with the rabble in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, the men who slinked into kirkyards with spades at night to bring the freshly buried back to the surface.