The boy brushed the hair from his face. “You didn’t go in when you could’ve. I was watching. I mean, I wasn’t watching you, but I saw you.”
“I was hoping,” Hazel said, smoothing her skirts, “to slip in once the demonstration started. To avoid notice. I don’t imagine many women come to this sort of thing.”
“Suppose not.”
Hazel waited. The boy shuffled his feet and tried to wipe the dust from his hands on his trousers. Finally, Hazel spoke. “I’m Miss Sinnett,” she said.
The moment she said her name, she regretted it. The boy’s lips curled into a small smile, and he swept into a deep bow. “A pleasure, Miss Sinnett.” He was still smiling when he came up.
The back of Hazel’s neck reddened. “It’s customary now for you to introduce yourself.”
The boy’s smile widened into a smirk, the glint of his long canine teeth visible. “Is it, now?” he said, but he didn’t offer his name. Instead, he said, “If you still want to see the happenings in there, I know a way inside.”
“Inside the surgical theater?”
The boy nodded.
“Yes! Please!” Hazel caught the excitement in her voice. “I mean, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s not. I don’t mind.” Without waiting, the boy took Hazel’s hand and pulled her through an alleyway so narrow she hadn’t even noticed it before, with wet stones on either side of them that smelled like mold and sweat. The cage on Hazel’s skirt grazed both sides of the walls. The boy was sure-footed, hopping up and weaving through the uneven stones as if he were made of smoke. At a wooden door, he gave two hard knocks. The door opened from the inside, and in an instant, the boy had pulled Hazel through it, into a dark passage lit only by a single torch at the far end.
“Do you work here?” Hazel whispered as he guided her forward. “For the anatomists?”
“In a sense,” he answered, looking back at Hazel. His gray eyes seemed to glow in the dark, and though the air was stuffy, Hazel suddenly became cold. “Here, come on.”
They had made their way to the end of the dark passage. The torch on the wall made the boy’s face look strange, all angles and shadows. Hazel could hear voices nearby—murmuring chatter, the melody of a booming baritone—but she couldn’t make out words.
“If you want to see it, the door is here,” he said.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” Hazel asked.
“Nah,” the boy said. “I see enough misery in real life to need to see some doctor do it for applause.” Hazel wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. From the other side of the wall came the sound of a man screaming. Even in the torchlight, Hazel could make out her guide raising his eyebrow as if to say, See?
He opened the door a crack, but Hazel couldn’t see what was on the other side. She hesitated. “It’s a’right,” the boy said. “You’ll be fine. Trust me.”
Hazel nodded and lifted her skirts to slip as quietly as she could past the boy. When their bodies were pressed to each other by the narrow walls, he averted his eyes. Hazel put her hand on the doorknob and gave it a gentle push. The wooden door widened soundlessly, and Hazel realized why the boy had been so certain she would be fine: the door opened beneath the risers that the men were seated on. She was looking through their legs and past their boots, but she had a perfect view of Beecham’s stage, fewer than twenty yards away.
Hazel turned to say thank you, but the boy had already disappeared into the darkness.
From A Primer to the Gentleman’s Field of Physician （1779） by Sir Thomas Murburry:
The difference between the eighteenth-century surgeon and the physician is stark and distinct. A physician may be a gentleman of social standing and considerable means, with access to medical college and a proper education in Latin and the fine arts. It is his role to consult and advise on the matter of all ailments, internal and external, and to provide whatever poultices or medicines may offer relief.
A surgeon, by contrast, is more often a man of lower social status who understands that a genius in the study of anatomy may provide him a pathway to elevated rank. He must be prepared to work with the poor and deformed, the monsters unloved and made gruesome by either war or circumstance.
The physician works with his mind. The surgeon works with his hands, and his brute strength.
6
HE HAD HELPED THE PRETTY GIRL. HE didn’t know why. She was wealthy, the type that should have helped herself. But Jack was there anyway. He had stolen through the back passages of the theater of the Anatomists’ Society more times than he could count. Maybe he felt sorry for her, standing there in the close, looking more alone than was possible, her cheeks flushed pink with either embarrassment or a chill. There had been blood on her glove the last time he saw her, down in the New Town, where the buildings were straight and polished as ha’pennies and grass grew confined to neat little squares. She was out of place here, in the Old Town.