Anatomy: A Love Story(69)

She shook her head as if to banish the thoughts. She would still be able to make it. She had plenty of time. The floor began to slope downward slightly, and Hazel heard the quiet lilt of voices from the other side of a door she couldn’t see in the gloom.

“—means that you won’t feel a thing, I assure you.”

“—Gone through the procedure myself—”

“We chose this one because he’s young, see? Worth the extra thrippence, I promise ye that.”

Hazel turned the heavy metal knob and winced at the squeak. She waited for shouts, for the tempo or temperature of the murmurs on the stage to change, but they hadn’t heard her. Hazel opened the door an inch, just enough to let a crack of light through, and then, when there was no reaction from the men on the stage, she opened the door far enough to allow her to turn sideways and slip through.

The smell of straw hit her first—fresh straw had been deposited on the floor of the stage and beneath the risers, presumably to soak up blood. Hazel gave silent thanks for all the etiquette lessons her mother had insisted upon to teach her quiet, ladylike steps, and she crept slow as a sigh through the shadows as far as she dared.

Without the camouflaging benefit of a hundred men’s legs hanging off the stands, Hazel was forced to stay far back, close enough to make out the scene on the stage in rough shapes only. There was a man sitting up on a surgical bed, talking jovially. It was his voice that echoed through the hall. The veiled body was still in its chair, with the man in the tall hat standing menacingly over its shoulder. And in the center of the stage of the operating theater, brandishing the blue bottle of ethereum in one hand and a lace handkerchief in the other, was a doctor.

The doctor wore a leather butcher’s apron, and a strange contraption covered his face. The contraption looked like goggles, but instead of two pieces of glass, it had only one. One circular magnifying glass in the center of the doctor’s face, concealing his identity and turning him into a creature out of Greek mythology. There he was: the one-eyed man Jeanette had dreamed about, a distorted cyclops with a round glass eye set in brass. His magnified iris flashed blue and undulated through the glass like ocean water.

“The ethereum is the key here, my lord. Perhaps you saw my demonstration earlier in the season?”

The figure on the bed rose on its elbows. “I can’t say I did, Doctor.”

The doctor wet the handkerchief with the iridescent blue liquid. “Well, the effect is quite remarkable. I find that patients have likened it to a good night’s sleep. You wake up in a few hours’ time feeling quite refreshed. At worst, it’s akin to a bad night’s sleep. The worst of it will be the soreness in the new eye, but that should abate within a few weeks. You’ll find the blurriness improves day to day.”

“I much look forward to that, Doctor, I tell you.” The figure was Baron Walford, dressed in a plain linen shirt but unmistakable. He smacked his lips audibly and reclined back onto the table. “Do your worst, Doctor,” he said. “I look forward to being rid of that dreadful false eye once and for all.”

The doctor’s expression was invisible behind his glass. He brought the ethereum-soaked handkerchief down on the baron’s face, and then he turned to the veiled figure in the chair.

“If you will, sir,” the doctor said to the man in the tall hat.

The man whipped the black veil off the figure in the wheelchair and revealed a boy, a boy with blond hair so dirty it looked almost brown, with his hands bound in his lap and a rag tied around his face to prevent him from screaming. The boy wriggled against his constraints, whipping his body back and forth to try to free himself. Even from her distance, Hazel could make out the raw panic in his face, which was turning beet red.

“Now, now,” the doctor cooed, and he rewet his handkerchief with the ethereum before pressing it into the hostage’s face. The boy struggled against his captors, and then went limp.

“There we are,” the doctor said. “Let’s get him onto the table. If you will, sir?”

The man in the tall hat helped the doctor lift the boy out of the chair and toward the long table in the center of the stage, directly beside where Baron Walford was lying peacefully as if he were merely asleep. The boy’s body dragged lifeless as a rag doll’s.

“A nightmare to find the right eye color,” the man in the tall hat said, his voice rough as gravel. “Got me a dozen lads before I landed one with the right shade. ‘Mahogany,’ innit? Tell me them peepers ain’t mahogany.”

“Yes, yes,” the doctor said. “I can imagine the trouble. But for what this fine gentleman on the table is paying, I think it serves us to give him exactly what he wants.”

The man in the tall hat cleared his throat. “How much is he paying then? This sort of thing?”

“Now, now, Jones, you know I find it uncouth to talk about money. But I assure you, enough that he should be able to request his new eye will match his old.” The doctor adjusted the lens of his magnifier and selected a scalpel from the table. “The procedure itself is fairly simple, especially because the client didn’t have an eye to begin with. The socket has already been primed. Now all we need—”

He lowered the scalpel with a repulsive squelch onto the face of the boy, who was unconscious but still bound at the wrists. The boy didn’t stir as the doctor’s knife dug below his brow bone and carved a thick gash down his nose. “Out we pop,” the doctor said, and took the boy’s left eye out from its socket. “Jones, please fetch mungroot powder, silver dust, and the poultice I keep in the black jar from the cabinet, if you will.”