Anatomy: A Love Story(68)
“Don’t be late now,” Iona warned her as she finished lacing. “You’ve reminded me a dozen times, and I haven’t forgotten: it’s eight o’clock on the nose.”
Hazel straightened the cuffs of her gloves. “I won’t be late. Trust me.” She still remembered her first morning trying to sneak into Dr. Beecham’s surgical demonstration at the Anatomists’ Society, and being on the opposite side of a locked door when the bell rang out through the city.
There was still frost on the ground when she set out to the carriage, dew frozen solid in the night and crystallized. Hazel relished the crunch of her shoe on the grass. This was going to be a good day, she thought.
Her confidence lasted until the carriage finished its climb up the slope to Edinburgh’s Old Town; through its window, Hazel caught her first glimpse of other prospective physicians marching toward the examination room at the university. They were, as a whole, a serious group, men in dark coats and worn boots, with spectacles and expressions of intense concentration on their faces. They walked across the cobblestones gazing at their feet, brows furrowed. Hazel’s stomach clenched and her breakfast turned to bile in her throat. The rocking of the carriage was going to make her sick. “You can stop the carriage,” she called out to the driver. “I’ll walk from here.”
The cold greeted her as she opened the door—her dress was too thin for the December chill, and she had forgotten to bring a fur. Hazel walked at a quick clip to warm herself as she headed over the bridge and toward the university. No one paid her any mind as she whipped along the stone street, past shops smelling like warm meat and day-old ale, beggars curled under blankets under their eaves; past mutts with stiff coats of hair whipping their muscular tails in excitement at whatever scraps had been let out, children playing a game with cups and dice; past a man in a tall hat wheeling a veiled figure in a chair.
Hazel froze. The man and the chair disappeared behind a corner into an alley. How had Jeanette described it to them? Her dream of a veil. And then Munro had told the same story. He had described this, this exact scene, being wheeled through the city beneath a heavy black veil. No one on the street but Hazel had stopped or noticed anything unusual. To their eyes, it was an elderly widow in mourning, or an invalid spending a morning out of the house.
Hazel held her breath for a moment and watched as the man and the chair wheeled off the main street and into an alley, the close leading toward the Anatomists’ Society. Hazel stepped forward, unable to resist peeking around the corner. She saw the swish of a cape and a closing door to confirm what she already knew: whoever was in the wheelchair was being delivered to the operating theater.
A bell went off in her mind. Today was Monday. Baron Walford was getting his surgery today, at the Anatomists’ Society. Wasn’t that what he had said? What was happening behind that closed door?
She had plenty of time before the examination—she had set out so early that she could have walked from Hawthornden to the university and still been settled in her seat when the examination began, with time to fill her inkwell. There was surely no harm in just … poking her head in. Seeing what they were doing. It was certainly nothing. Baron Walford had been drunk at the dinner, anyway. He was probably just being fitted for a new glass eye, and the woman in the chair was … an elderly widow meeting her grandson, a visiting scholar.
She had time. She had plenty of time. Hazel wished Jack were here, able to talk sense into her, tell her if she was being ridiculous, if she should ignore the baron and the woman and stay focused. Stay focused on getting to the university, on the examination, on her future. But Jack wasn’t here; he was somewhere in the city without her, and it was just Hazel standing alone on the busy corner, biting at the flesh of her cuticles while she mentally played out each alternative.
The choice was made for her the moment she saw the wheelchair disappear behind the door, when her heart began pounding in her ears and her excitement and fear made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Hazel pulled off her hat, looked around to see if anyone was watching her, and disappeared into the small alley to the side of the building, where only a few months before, a boy she didn’t yet know as Jack Currer had shown her a secret entrance.
From Dr. Beecham’s Treatise on Anatomy: or, The Prevention and Cure of Modern Diseases (17th Edition, 1791) by Dr. William R. Beecham:
The purpose of a physician is to protect and serve his fellow man. That is the singular directive of those who commit themselves to this illustrious profession: help those in need. The purpose of study should be the expansion of knowledge, but never for its own sake. Leave knowledge for its own sake to the philosophers. A physician’s life is too short to waste it in idle academia—if he uses his mind, he should also be using his hands.
33
THE STONE HALLWAY WAS DARKER THAN Hazel remembered, and narrower. Spiderwebs clutched at her skirts, and she tried to suppress a sneeze from the dust that floated in the air, hovering in the thin rectangles of light that had managed to push through around the edges of the splintering door behind her. It became darker the farther Hazel walked, and colder. Ten steps along the hallway, she deeply regretted her decision; she should be sitting in the examination hall at the university, smirking at Thrupp’s taunts because she knew she could handle anything the examination threw at her. Her parchment would have been neat, her handwriting impeccable. Maybe she would have come first in the class. The minutes were ticking by.