Anatomy: A Love Story(47)

Hazel hesitated, and for half a moment, Jack was convinced this was all a mistake, bringing Hazel here, that she was going to get them caught or cry out—but then she had done it. She had jumped the fence without even catching the hem of her trousers.

“So where’s the grave?” she said, catching her breath.

Now Jack was grinning. He tilted his head and led the way toward the southeastern corner of the cemetery, where he had seen the funeral gathering a few days prior. Unfortunately, in the dark, with his head half scrambled with fear and the lingering smell of Hazel’s hair, Jack found the fresh grave much harder to locate than he had planned on.

“I swear, it’s somewhere around here,” Jack whispered. The longer they were here, the riskier it became. The trick to being a good resurrection man was getting in, and getting out, before a mourner half a yard away would even know that you were there.

Hazel walked slowly, trying to make out the names carved onto the gravestones. She stood in front of each one, her mouth silently making out the shapes of their names. “So many children,” she said quietly.

And so many deaths in 1815, the year the fever had swept through Edinburgh without mercy, killing rich and poor alike, nobles and their servants. It was a slow illness often, and a brutal one, so contagious in the hours before death that families were known to leave the suffering alone in their homes, weeping and pawing at the windows, begging for someone, anyone, to come and hold them while they died. And it struck children, and young men and women. That was the illness’s true cruelty: it often claimed those who had not yet had a chance to live.

“It’s here,” Jack whispered. He stood before a mound of unsettled earth, damp and recently dug, and a tiny wooden cross.

Hazel joined him and grabbed one of the spades. “So now we dig,” she said.

“Now we dig.”

They worked in silence for the better part of an hour. Every few minutes, Jack would lift his head to make sure the parish was still quiet, but Hazel, to his surprise, was an astonishingly diligent worker. She scarcely lifted her head, working methodically and creating a hypnotic rhythm: the sound of her spade scraping through the earth, and then the gentle pat of the soil being deposited on the surface. Scratch. Pat. Scratch. Pat. Scratch. Pat.

And then a sound broke the rhythm—something distant, in the woods. A crunching of leaves. Maybe the clawing of a small animal against the tree bark. Hazel didn’t notice, her spade continuing its task at pace, but Jack lifted his head. The trees were too dark to make anything out. Just the horses, he told himself. Had to be the horses. He’d been doing this long enough not to get spooked by shadows.

A more immediate noise hit them: metal against wood, the sound of Hazel’s spade vibrating against the wooden coffin. “All right,” Jack said, “I’m going to break it now.”

Hazel nodded and shielded her eyes from any errant slivers of wood as Jack lifted his spade aloft and brought it down with a single confident stroke onto the coffin lid. It snapped like a pistol shot. Jack threw his spade over the side of the hole they had dug and back onto the grass, then pulled himself up to follow it. “Throw me the piece from the top of the casket. Then I’m going to lower you down some rope. Wrap it around his legs, then I’ll do the heavy lifting.”

Hazel nodded her silent assent. She twisted the piece of broken lid free and handed it off, and then assessed what she had revealed: a pair of feet in tattered brown shoes with barely enough material to hold them together, and the vile smell of putrefaction and death. A maggot wriggled between the corpse’s toes, and Hazel gagged into her sleeve. “I wish I could say you get used to that,” Jack whispered, shielding his own nose.

As he dropped the rope down to Hazel, he glanced back at the woods, where he thought he had seen the shadow. There was movement there. Something impossible to make out. Maybe just an animal, a fox skulking amid the mossy undergrowth. All Jack could do now was finish the job quickly and get out.

Hazel wound the rope around the body’s ankles several times, and then tied it off in a tight square knot. “Ready.”

Jack pulled, and a spray of soil came down across Hazel’s face from where the rope slid up the side of the grave. Hazel tried to help guide the body up and out of the casket, through the splintery gap in the wood, but Jack did most of the physical labor, pulling steadily up and away until the body slithered, feetfirst, back to the living world—six feet up.

Jack lowered a hand then to help Hazel up. “Now we have to undress him, make sure we don’t bring any of his clothes with us. We’re not thieves, after all.”

They stood over the body when their task was complete, the darkness protecting the dead stranger’s modesty. “This is strange,” Hazel said. “It feels like we’re at a funeral.”

“You get used to it,” Jack said, already starting the process of wrapping the body in the sheet. He hoisted the body over his shoulder with ease. Hazel had thought Jack was all sharp edges and thin lines, but he was surprisingly strong. He lowered the body into the cart tenderly and then gestured to Hazel and the horse. “After you, m’lady.”

Hazel hoisted herself onto Miss Rosalind’s saddle, then lowered her hand to help Jack up behind her.

They made it back to Hawthornden just as the sky began to lighten into misty gray. Jack followed Hazel into her dungeon and deposited the body onto her table.