Anatomy: A Love Story(30)

Her heart pounded. It felt good to destroy something. She did it again, with another case, this time containing an Egyptian beetle her father had brought back for her. It shattered against the floor in shards, with bits of glass glistening like gemstones in the carpet. Hazel brought her arm across a pile of books and threw them all to the ground. She tore pages from her notebooks in fistfuls. The broken glass was everywhere now, pricking her feet, and while she could see blood spots emerging on her legs, she barely felt any pain at all. Her ears rang with an echoing sound of laughter that she realized with a shock was her own.

It was useless, pointless, foolish. Humiliating. She had been so proud of reenacting the Galvini experiment that Bernard had described to her, so proud of performing a parlor trick. It wasn’t anything novel or helpful to anyone. She hadn’t contributed to the world. She had made a frog dance for her own amusement. She had been the dancing frog all along. How diverting! Look, quick, come see: a woman who fancies reading about blood and gore! Pay your tuppence, go inside, she’ll even pretend she’s going to be a surgeon someday! Don’t worry if she stains her skirts with bile—one of her servants will clean it off for her. Her father will buy her another gown. Pay another ha’penny, and you can see her in a man’s jacket!

Hazel continued tearing through her books until she had an armful of crumpled pages. She kicked open the door to the balcony, and before she thought better of it, she threw all of it over the railing, into the ravine far below.

The pages separated in the air, some caught by the wind. For a moment they were suspended, flying like a flock of broken birds. And then they fell. Hazel watched until the pages disappeared beneath the canopy of foliage.

Hazel returned to her room and saw with fresh eyes the damage she had done. The floor was strewn with bits of broken glass, with pieces of insects and feathers. A bottle of ink had spilled on her dressing gown; a stain black as oil was seeping up from the hem. Her copy of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise was splayed open on a bust of David Hume.

Iona stood in the doorway, her face a mask of shock and horror. “Miss!” she said.

“I’m so sorry, Iona.” Hazel gingerly pulled a stray pen from where it had embedded itself like an arrow in a portrait of her great-grandfather. “That must have made such an awful racket below.”

“Your feet, miss!”

Hazel looked down and understood why Iona had looked so horrified. Her feet were red, as if she were wearing a pair of colored stockings, covered in blood. “It doesn’t hurt so bad as all that. I’ll wash them in the tub and be right as rain. And I’ll clean all this up. I am sorry. I must have—temporarily lost my mind.”

Iona chewed at a nail nervously. “Miss, your— I mean, Lord Bernard Almont, is at the door for you.”

“Bernard? Now? Whatever for?”

“I can’t say, miss.”

Hazel examined herself herself in the looking glass. She was still wearing her chemise, which was stuck to her in places with sweat. Her hair was half down and wild without a bonnet, knotted and matted and flat from sleep. Her hands were covered in ink and blood, scraped all over as though with a schoolboy’s pen nib. “Please tell Bernard—er, his Lordship—that I’m indisposed at the moment, and that I will call on him later this week.”

“Yes, miss,” Iona said, and scurried from the room with one last mournful glance back at the mess in the corner of the room.

Hazel sighed. She put a chair upright that had fallen on its side. The low murmurs of Iona’s sweet voice echoed from downstairs. Hazel heard Bernard’s rough reply, although she couldn’t make out the words, and then came footsteps.

Iona reappeared. “He insists on seeing you, miss,” she said. The two women made eye contact.

“All right,” Hazel said dully. “I suppose we don’t have time for a bath, but I can at least brush my hair while we find some clean stockings.” The two women worked with single-minded focus on making Hazel look as close to presentable as they could manage. After Hazel plucked half a dozen glass splinters from her palms, Iona helped her slide on her sturdiest pair of gloves, in a deep maroon that wouldn’t show if one of her scratches began to bleed. After fifteen minutes of their best efforts, Hazel looked … well, not good. She still had dark bags under her eyes from crying, and her skin was sallow; her hair, which as it turned out would have required at least an hour of careful brushing to look presentable, was concealed beneath one of Hazel’s least favorite hats. But she looked human and at the very least well enough to meet her cousin, a boy who had seen her splashing naked in the mud when they were toddlers.

“Bernard,” Hazel said when she reached the top of the landing and saw him standing below, “to what in the world do we owe the pleasure of your company?”

“You might apologize for keeping me waiting,” Bernard said to his cuff link.

Hazel furrowed her brow. “All right, then. I’m sorry, Bernard.”

Bernard puffed up. He was in a coat she had never seen before, bright robin’s-egg blue, paired with a yellow waistcoat and matching trousers. Hazel would have guessed he was in costume as Young Werther if there was any chance at all that Bernard had read it. He carried a bouquet in his hand of white lilies wrapped in ribbon. “For you,” he said, thrusting them at her. “They told me at the market they represent purity. And devotion. My father mentioned that you might have taken ill.”