Anatomy: A Love Story(28)

“I can’t, sir,” she said finally.

“You can’t?” Straine said with a cruel edge in his voice. “But you so ably identified them when you were seated?”

“It looks very different in person, sir.”

“Where is the gallbladder, Mr. Hazelton?”

Hazel looked at the mess of viscera beneath her. Reds and purples swollen and pressing against each other, everything strange and bulbous. That was the stomach, she knew the stomach … and that was the large intestine. And the lungs. But anything smaller seemed lost in the sea of deteriorating flesh bloated with the gas of decomposition. Hazel’s vision blurred and her breath caught in her tightened chest. “I’m not certain, sir.”

“How about an easier one, then? The liver.”

Hazel forced herself to look down again at the corpse’s open belly, but the place where she thought the liver ought to be was filled with something else—maybe the small intestine?—and nothing else was where it was supposed to be either. She had been quiet, staring down for long enough for the giggles to start up in the classroom. Hazel suddenly came back to the realization that everyone was watching her. “I don’t know,” she said at last, quietly.

“Sit down, Mr. Hazleton.”

Hazel’s cheeks stung as she returned to her seat.

“Let this be a lesson to you all,” Straine said, his eye fixed on Hazel. “What you read in books might help if you intend to show off in class, but it will do very little when you’re faced with a real body. Do you imagine that you’ll be operating on drawings in books, Mr. Hazelton?”

“No, sir,” Hazel murmured.

Straine’s thin lips twitched. He didn’t look at Hazel for the rest of the lecture. By the time the sun had set and Straine finally released them, Hazel’s hand ached from the effort of taking notes fast enough to keep up with his lesson. Hazel gathered her notebook and rose to head home, already fantasizing about the bath Iona would run for her at Hawthornden.

“Mr. Hazleton.” Straine’s voice called out from the gloom. “Please stay a moment.”

Hazel’s heart pounded in her chest. Burgess gave her a sympathetic look but then quickly turned and scampered out the door before Straine could ask him to stay back as well. Hazel tried to tilt her face down beneath her collar and her cap. In the weeks she had been dressing like George, no one had seen through her disguise. (Thrupp calling her a “pretty boy” was the closest anyone had come, and even that had made the hair on the back of her neck prickle.) But Straine had seen her, in Almont House. They had been introduced. And something about the steely look in his good eye gave Hazel the impression that he never forgot a face.

“Do you take me for a fool?” he said slowly, letting each syllable linger on his tongue, after Hazel had come as close as she dared.

“Sir?” she squeaked.

“Do you,” he said again, “take me for a fool?” His voice was soft.

“No, sir—of course not,” Hazel managed.

“I am not one for masked balls, Mr. Hazelton. That is the type of frivolity afforded to the wealthy, the landed gentry who have nothing better to do with their time than to amuse one another with nonsense until they eat themselves to death. Some of us have had to work for a living, Mr. Hazleton, to earn our way through discipline and effort and ingenuity and”—his hand flicked up toward his missing eye—“sacrifice. I do not teach because I enjoy culling the sniveling herd of dimwits who want to play doctor, nor because I find it so gratifying to demonstrate, year after year, the most basic principles of anatomy. I teach for money, Mr. Hazleton, and I teach because I think it to be my duty to educate the men who will actually go on to serve as professionals in my city.”

“Sir—”

“Let us drop the ruse now, Miss Sinnett. If you do not, as you claim, imagine me to be a fool, then pray tell why do you continue to believe yourself so easily able to fool me?” Hazel’s blood turned to ice. Slowly, she lifted her arms to remove her brother’s top hat, revealing the hair held up by pins underneath. “An amusing game to you, I’m sure.”

Hazel looked at the hat while she spoke. “Sir, I am sorry for the deception, but I assure you, it was never meant to be a game. I do mean to learn anatomy, and I do mean to be a surgeon.”

“Hah!” Straine’s laugh rattled the skeleton of the aquatic beast hanging from the ceiling, but no joy reached his eye.

Hazel burned. “If you think just because I’m a woman that I’m incapable of learning—”

Straine interrupted her with another chilling laugh. “You do take me for a fool then, Miss Sinnett. My, what a shame. I might have thought you were smarter than that after all. No, unlike some of my more regrettable colleagues, I wouldn’t object to teaching the rare woman who had a mind capable of natural philosophy and the study of the body. Yes, on the whole, the female brain is smaller, more susceptible to hysterics and emotion, less inclined to reason. But there’s no reason to believe that a specimen might not emerge from the female sex able enough to be taught.”

There was a chance then! Was this an olive branch? Was there a possibility that Straine saw Hazel as that exception? Maybe if she shed her costume and begged forgiveness, she could continue in his class. She opened her mouth to begin her apology, but before the word was formed, Straine continued.