Were they going to get in trouble? No more than the trouble they got in just being poor and living on the streets of Edinburgh. Body snatchers were a vital organ of the living city itself. It was filthy, and the fancy folks liked to look away, but they were essential nonetheless. Everyone knew they were doing it; police hardly cared, so long as they didn’t take clothes or jewels from the graves. Wealthier families had iron cage mortsafes, or solid stone slabs above the graves to protect them from people like Jack. Poorer families sometimes had someone sitting and watching, a sentinel who would stay beside the grave for three or four days, until the body decomposed enough to no longer be valuable to doctors for study. （Both of those were easy enough to get around for a professional like Jack—start from twenty yards away and dig a tunnel straight through and underneath. Pull the body out, and no one ever knows.）
Mostly, though, it was the unloved who made Jack’s living, the bodies buried shallow and forgotten. They would be invaluable to Jack, and to the doctors he sold them to. Whatever little those poor souls did in life, they did plenty in death.
He had thought that starting work at Le Grand Leon would mean giving up that life, the long nights of digging until his shoulders ached, of pulling bodies bloated with gas and shit, of worms that wriggled into his shoes. He had a place to sleep, nestled into the canvas laid across the planks above the stage, and Mr. Arthur made stews for the crew out of cabbage and potato skins and whatever bits the crew could scrounge up.
The way Jack liked to think of it, he had a better view up here than even those posh folks in their fancy box seats, and all he had to do was make sure the curtain and right backdrops unfurled at the right time. Those people in the audience were stuck in their seats, wearing their silk—which would wrinkle if you stood wrong, let alone jumped a garden fence—and shoes that pinched their feet. But the want of money creeps up on you like a fox in the darkness.
And there was Isabella. Always Isabella, dancing on the stage below him night after night. How could anyone not fall in love with her after seeing the way she moved, the way the lanterns onstage made her blond hair glow—made all of her glow? She was the closest thing to an angel Jack had ever seen in Edinburgh.
Jack had worked as a stagehand at Le Grand Leon two months before he started stealing bodies again in the night.
“Ye all right?” Thomas, the lead actor, called up to Jack from the wings during an applause break. Thomas was already dressed in his costume for the next scene, when he appeared as the devil, disguised as the lady’s former lover. Jack nodded. Thomas was from Birmingham—God knew how he had made it to Le Grand Leon, but he liked to tell anyone who would listen that he was going to save up enough money to make it down to London to perform Shakespeare for the king. He was handsome in that broad-shouldered actor sort of way, the type of handsome that had the ladies who do the costuming giggling behind their hands. Jack tended to disappear into the shadows, but that was by design. Like a nocturnal animal, the best way for Jack to remain safe was to remain unseen.
Life at Le Grand Leon was like living inside a music box. The gilt-edged ceiling was painted in four sections meant to represent the four seasons, each with its own collection of potato-shaped cherubs with cheeks the color of roses and skin the color of ivory. And like a music box, there was the dancer, center stage, Isabella Turner. Jack could imagine her like one of those porcelain ballerinas he saw in the window of the antique shop on Holyrood Street, a ballerina balancing on one foot, the other extended out behind her, her arm lifted, her entire body taut like a pulled bowstring. Spinning onstage slowly, to the sound of windup music.
Back when he was living in Fleshmarket Close, he had passed that antique store every day. But he finally built up the courage to walk in only last week. The woman behind the counter had glowered at him, and glowered even harder as she watched him pick up the music box in the window.
“How much for this?”
“More than ye can afford, I reckon,” she said, but not so unkindly as she might have.
“I have work. I do, I swear it. Work down at Le Grand Leon. How much for this one, here?” The ballerina in the music box was blond, like Isabella.
The shop owner sighed and drummed her finger on the counter. “I’ve seen you out there before, haven’t I? Looking in the window.” Jack nodded. “Least I can do for her is ten shillings.”
Jack’s eyes nearly fell out of his head. That was as much as he made in a month of work. But he had come with his mind made up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the coins. “Take it, then,” he said. And he left the shop before he could talk himself into changing his mind. It was for Isabella, and it was perfect. It would just mean another night at the kirkyard, and he would steal and sell a thousand bodies if it meant buying Isabella the things that would show her how much he adored her. Let him spend every night in the dirt if it meant getting his mornings with her.