Anatomy: A Love Story(43)

“Until what?”

Jack sighed. “My partner—er, or, he’s not really a partner, more like a colleague, really. Munro. He’s, well, missing. He went on a dig the other night, few nights back—alone, I thought, but maybe not—and anyways, he didn’t come back.”

Hazel gazed at him quizzically. “Well, maybe he made other plans. Left town. Visiting some family.”

“He wouldn’t do that without saying goodbye. And he’s not the first one, is the thing. Resurrection men going missing more often than not these days.”

“You think someone is killing resurrection men?”

“No, I don’t—I mean, it’s probably coppers cracking down. One of us probably accidentally got the body of a wealthy somebody or his wife, and now the police want all our heads to make him happy. These sorts of things happen for a bit, lawmen getting overeager. They lose interest in us soon enough.”

He almost mentioned the story Munro had told him, months back, about the three strange men who had approached him after a resurrection. At the time, Jack had thought it was just one of Munro’s tall tales, the type of ghost story he spread to make himself seem tougher and more interesting, like how he also claimed he could shoot a sparrow with a pistol at sixty paces. Jack had made fun of him for it, and Munro was embarrassed and bought the next round.

“But, anyways,” Jack continued, “it’s just too risky to go alone now, and I don’t have a lookout, so unless I want to join Munro in a cell or, or wherever he is, that’s it for now.”

Hazel picked up the coins Jack had refunded her. She ran her fingers along the metal edges. “What if you didn’t have to go alone?” she said carefully. “Would you do another dig, for a body, if you did have a partner?”

“I suppose,” Jack said.

“Well, lovely. We’ll go tonight, then.” Hazel strolled past him, out of the dungeon. “And I’ll be a very generous partner, let you keep all the money. Really, I should be asking for half.”

Hazel was on the garden path and already halfway back to the castle before Jack broke from his astonished daze and caught up to her. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait. That’s madness. I’m not doing a dig with a lady.”

“You won’t be,” Hazel said. “You’ll be doing it with me. I have plenty of old boots lying around, and I’ve gotten very comfortable in my brother’s trousers. I’m not sure how much help I’ll be with regards to digging, but as a lookout, I’m unmatched, I assure you.”

Jack’s head spun with everything she had just said. “Wait,” he repeated. “Wait, wait. No. If the guards catch us, they’ll think I’ve kidnapped you. They’ll think I’m taking liberties with some—some daughter of a—whatever your dad is.”

“Captain of the Royal Navy. It’s actually my mother with the title, the daughter—now sister, I suppose—of a viscount.”

Jack groaned.

“Well, pishposh to that,” Hazel said. “I’ll be dressed as a man.”

“Oh, will you now? I’m sure that will be very convincing.”

“More than you know. And anyhow, we won’t be caught.”

“We can’t do this.”

“We certainly can. I need a body. You need the money from a body, but more immediately, you need a partner to assist you in your resurrection. And here I am. Have you identified a body? One with the fever?”

Jack nodded reluctantly. He had scoped out the burial in the cemetery of Saint Dwynwen’s, outside Edinburgh’s city center. It was a body with no family, just two assistants from Saint Anthony’s, the poorhouse hospital, dropping the body off wrapped in a sheet, and a priest to murmur a few prayers and bury it in a cheap wooden box. There wasn’t even a headstone, just a simple wooden cross. Jack had overheard the priest murmur sadly to the groundskeeper as he shook his head: the fever had come fast for him.

“It’s dangerous,” Jack said. “Not just the risk of getting caught. People catch the fever from bodies all the time.”

“I had it already,” Hazel said simply. “You?”

Jack shrugged. “Been doing this long enough and haven’t got it. Something lucky in my blood, I suppose.”

“Well, then it’s settled,” Hazel said. “You and I will dig for the body together.”

“See, that’s the problem with wealthy people. You just assume you can do anything you want, whenever you want, and everything will just somehow work out for you!”

By this point, Hazel had reached Hawthornden’s heavy wooden front door. She turned back to Jack before entering. “Well, sometimes you can just do things. Who gave you permission to be digging up bodies from graves in the first place?”

“Nobody!” Jack spat. “It’s a crime! That’s the whole point of it.”

“And now it’s a crime that we’re going to do together.”

Jack could only laugh, and Hazel smiled back at him.

Their eyes met, and Hazel blushed. “Well,” she said. “You should get some sleep. There are guest rooms if you…” She gestured to the castle behind her.

Jack shook his head. He couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to stay as a guest in one of these grand houses. He doubted even his exhaustion would allow him to sleep in such strange surroundings.