Anatomy: A Love Story(70)

The man in the tall hat was staring at the open gash in the young boy’s face and smiling a terrible, wolfish smile. He nodded and obeyed, bringing the three ingredients the doctor had requested back to the table.

“It’s magic is what it is, Doc,” the man in the tall hat murmured as the doctor gingerly dabbed a drop of the poultice into the baron’s empty eye socket and followed it with the boy’s eyeball.

“Not magic at all, Jones,” the doctor said with more than a little impatience, continuing to dress the eye socket with the powders. “Nothing more than science. And, of course, an understanding of the human body perfected over decades of practice.” He chuckled a little, his focus still on the operation before him.

Hazel was frozen with terror. Her voice was trapped in her throat; her feet were rooted to the floor, heavy as if they were made of molten steel. In her mind she thought of the things she should be doing, the actions she should be taking: interrupting with a shout, knocking the knife from the doctor’s hands or, at the very least, running away to get help, to get the police constable again, drag him down the passageway in the alley and force him to see what was happening. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt the faint tug of the examination. It had probably already started, but maybe if she ran, she would be able to make it. But her body would not obey her mind. The terror inside her had become a living thing, a monster that turned her veins into frozen ice and her muscles to water. She could do nothing but continue to watch as the doctor completed his terrible operation, securing the boy’s mahogany eye into Baron Walford’s swollen, ruddy face.

When the surgery was complete, the doctor stepped away and examined his handwork, cocking his head. He wiped his knife on his apron and then reached into a pocket and pulled out a tiny vial of something brilliantly golden and glowing. It lit the doctor’s face from below, bright as a candle. “There we are. Just a drop to keep the infection away and make sure the new eye takes,” he murmured, and delicately tilted the vial so that a single golden drop fell onto the baron’s face.

“What should we do with him?” the man in the tall hat said, cocking his head toward the bound boy, whose now-empty eye socket was spilling a river of blood over the table and onto the straw below. “’E’s bleeding something fierce.”

The doctor was distracted, with all his attention on the baron. “Oh,” he said. “Cotton in the wound to stop him bleeding.” He tutted and gave the boy a quick glance. “Not sure this one is going to survive, bless him. We’ll keep him here for a few hours, see if he recovers. If he dies, send him behind the poorhouse. You know what to do, Jones. It’s the Roman fever if anyone asks.” He turned back toward the baron, leaning in close to appreciate his own work, the hundreds of tiny veins he had placed and sealed to give the man the new eye he was paying for. “Some of my best work, I think, Jones.”

“And some of your fastest too,” the man in the tall hat replied. “Done in half the time of some of your other work.”

“Well, I did try,” the doctor said. His hair was slick with effort. He pulled off his magnifying lens and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a gloved hand, and then Dr. Beecham turned to the bleachers of the surgical theater and looked directly at where Hazel was standing. “After all, we had an audience today.”





34




BEFORE HAZEL COULD MOVE, THE MAN in the tall hat had his rough hand around her elbow. He had advanced like a hound in the shadows, so quickly and silently that he was pulling Hazel forward, out toward the stage of the surgical theater by the time she cried out.

“Miss Sinnett,” Dr. Beecham said, wiping the blood from his gloves. “Welcome. I confess, I am actually delighted you thought to witness my surgery this morning. I always find my hands steadier when I’m performing for someone. How dull to make art in an empty room, a symphony gone unheard. And you’re one of the few who I believe may actually appreciate the gravity of what I do here. The rest of them”—he gestured to the sleeping baron, whose eye was now padded with cotton—“are perfectly content just to get what they want. They pay their fee, and the deed is done. No curiosity. No interest in science beyond their own silly little purposes. It’s tragic, in its own way, how small their lives are. How little they care for the world outside their own bodies. But you. You, Hazel Sinnett, you understand. The examination was this morning, wasn’t it? I suppose this means you forfeit our little wager. No matter really, no matter at all. I’m so much happier that you’re here.

“You understand how miraculous it really is, to take a living part from one man and transpose it into another, to restore the gift of sight via, well, a gift on the part of our generous donor. It took me years to be able to do eyes. Fingers, easy. No time at all. Full limbs, a natural progression from there. Now, the heart I haven’t quite mastered. Still working on the transposition of a heart. But I’m optimistic yet. The heart will be next for me.”

Hazel sputtered, struggling against the viselike grip of the man in the tall hat. All the questions she wanted to ask bubbled up in her chest at once, and the one that escaped her lips was, “What are you doing?”

Beecham stopped wiping his gloves. “What am I doing? My dear, I thought that was obvious?”

Hazel jerked her elbow away from the man in the tall hat, and Beecham raised his hand, indicating that his lackey could stand down. “You’re—you’re kidnapping people. You’re taking poor people, and then operating on them. Using your ethereum, and taking things from them. Limbs, organs, eyes.”