Anatomy: A Love Story(4)

A distant groan of thunder echoed through the valley below. It was time. She would breach the world between life and death, using electricity to reanimate flesh. What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand? And didn’t that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?

Hazel delicately set the poker down on one side of the frog and then, with an air of solemn reverence, she slowly lowered the kitchen fork down to the other side.

Nothing happened.

She moved the fork and the poker closer to the frog, and then, impatiently, set them touching the frog’s skin. Was she supposed to—? No, no, Bernard would have mentioned if the convict’s head had been impaled on a spike. When he came back from his grand tour, she had been breathless with questions about the demonstration he mentioned only in passing in his letter from Switzerland, a demonstration held by the son of the great scientist Galvini. Using electricity, the second Galvini had made frog legs dance and the severed head of a convict blink as if it were alive once again.

“It was frightening, really,” Bernard had said, bringing a cup of tea to his lips and beckoning for the servant to bring another ginger biscuit. “But marvelous, though, in its own strange way, don’t you think?”

Hazel did. Though Bernard had refused to talk about it any further (“Why must you be so morbid, Cousin!”), Hazel found she could conjure up the details of the scene in her mind as easily as if she had been there herself—the man in a French-style jacket, standing onstage in a tiny, wood-lined theater, the red velvet curtains behind him heavy with dust. Hazel could see the string of frogs’ legs jerking up and down, dancing like cancan girls, before Galvini whipped the cloth off the main attraction: the head of a man who had been hanged. In Hazel’s imagination, his neck was cut low enough to show the purplish bruises where the rope had cut in.

We men fear death, Hazel could imagine Galvini saying in a thick Italian accent. Death! Gruesome and terrible! Inevitable and senseless! We dance towards her as we might a beautiful woman (Italians loved to talk about beautiful women) and Death waltzes back towards us, beckoning, always beckoning. Once the veil is pierced, we never return. But it is a new century, my friends.

Here, Hazel imagined him holding a metal rod aloft like Hamlet with a skull, then raising his second rod and letting the lightning dance back and forth between them as the audience cooed. And mankind will conquer the laws of nature!

The audience gasped as the stage lights crackled with light, and gray gunpowder smoke popped for dramatic effect, and the convict’s head came alive.

Bernard described it in a letter that Hazel had read so many times she had memorized every line: the way the convict’s head had jerked when the rods were lowered to its temples, how its eyelids had scrolled open. For a moment, it might have been conscious again, blinking at the scene in front of it—the crowd of men and their wives in their best gloves and hats—and actually seeing them. Bernard hadn’t mentioned the head’s mouth opening, but Hazel found herself imagining a black tongue lolling, as if the head were bored of being trotted out for yet another performance, yet another matinee for yet another crowd.

When the performance was finished, Galvini would have bowed to incredulous applause, and then all the gentlemen would return to their chateaus and villas to amuse their hosts with their description of the evening over port wine.

It was like sorcery, Bernard had written. Although I’d never imagine a sorcerer to be wearing such ill-fitting trousers. Bernard had also mentioned in the letter that he purchased a hunting cape for four hundred francs and that he had seen Prince Friedrich von Hohenzollern wearing the same one.

But here she was, electricity heavy in the sky, metal on either side of the frog, and unlike Galvini’s subjects, Hazel’s remained insipidly, maddeningly, unmistakably inert. Hazel glanced behind her. Her bedroom was empty—her maid, Iona, always finished tidying before breakfast was over. Hazel could hear the tinkling notes of the pianoforte trilling from the open window in the music room, where Percy was having a lesson. Mrs. Herberts was preparing lunch to take up to Hazel’s mother, in her bedroom, as usual; she’d eat at her desk opposite a looking glass draped in gauzy black cloth.

Hazel held her breath and lifted the fire poker once more. There was one thing she hadn’t tried yet, but—Hazel was suddenly dizzy, her mind feeling light, as if it were being pulled to the top of her skull by a string. Her fingers shook. Before she let her body stop itself, she plunged the poker through the frog’s back and out through its stomach. The flesh was disconcertingly easy to pierce, the poker slipping through the brown skin easily to emerge wet, glistening in an indeterminate viscus.

“I’m sorry,” Hazel said aloud, and then immediately felt foolish. It was just a frog. It was just a dead frog. If she was going to become a surgeon, she would need to get acclimated to this sort of thing sooner or later. As if to prove her own fortitude to herself, she wriggled the poker through the frog a little farther. “There,” she murmured. “Serves you right.”

“Serves who right?” It was Percy, standing behind her, his eyes sleepy and hair matted, wearing only one stocking. In her excitement, she hadn’t noticed the pianoforte stop.

Though Percy was seven years old, their mother still had him dressed like a boy half that age, in a cotton shirt lined with blue piping and open at the collar. Lady Sinnett doted on him incessantly, as if he were a priceless and incredibly fragile piece of crystal. He was spoiled and selfish, but Hazel couldn’t find it in herself to be annoyed with him, because the truth was, she felt sorry for him. Hazel enjoyed a rare freedom from their mother smothering him with all her attention, while Percy was hardly allowed to leave the house lest he, heaven forbid, scrape his knee on the garden path.