“That’s quite enough, Mr. Thrupp.”
Thrupp rolled his eyes as Dr. Beecham made his way back to the front of the classroom.
“Now, what’s say we all get caught up to where Mr. Hazelton already is,” Beecham said, beginning to draw a diagram of a flayed rabbit on the chalkboard.
Hazel felt something wet and cold hit the back of her neck.
A rabbit heart, which landed on the floor behind her, still leaking blood. Thrupp’s cronies laughed and Thrupp smirked at her, and Hazel felt a slimy wetness drip from her neck down into her shirt.
Her cheeks burned, but Hazel forced herself not to break eye contact with that boy as she reached down and picked his rabbit heart off the floor. Looking straight at him, she brought the rabbit heart up and squeezed it, hard, in her first.
The laughing stopped, and Hazel turned back to listen to the rest of Dr. Beecham’s lecture, too pleased with herself even to care about the unpleasant squelching of the blood and viscus between her fingers for the rest of the afternoon.
7 October 1817
No. 2 Henry Street
Bath
My dear Hazel,
After a nightmarishly long journey—awful, the weather, just awful—we arrived in Bath. The air already suits Percy, but I’ll get him into the natural hot springs straightaway as a preventative measure. Who knows what terrible diseases he might have picked up from the bad airs on our travels? We shall be here for several months and then head to the London apartment, where I hope you will meet us. I’ve told Lord Almont that I expect Bernard to propose within the year, so do try to arrive in London engaged if you can.
—Your mother, Lady Lavinia Sinnett
P.S. I hope your condition has improved. Do write if anything takes a turn for the worse.
12
THE WEEKS PASSED FOR HAZEL IN A HEADY daze. Though her childhood afternoons spent on the floor of her father’s study memorizing his old copy of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise had given her a leg up on the other students initially, it soon became obvious that she would need to absorb everything she could in class if she hoped to pass the Physician’s Exams at the end of term.
She took notes as quickly as she could to keep up with the pace of Dr. Beecham’s lectures, which jumped from the lymphatic system to skeletal structure to the use of leeches in modern bloodletting; he reminded them not infrequently that the class would only be getting more difficult, especially once they started to watch human dissections. That was the real heart of the course, what students paid the fees for: the chance to see a professional efficiently autopsy a body. Whether the bodies were procured from public hangings or resurrectionists, Hazel wasn’t sure. George had been buried in the family kirkyard outside Hawthornden, so Hazel’s family never had to concern themselves with the rabble in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, the men who slinked into kirkyards with spades at night to bring the freshly buried back to the surface.
Initially, Hazel worried that her disguise wouldn’t hold, that experts of the human body would see her—in an oversized hat and trousers that even Iona’s hemming couldn’t get to sit quite right—and easily identify her for what she was: a young woman in her brother’s clothes. But the classroom was dim, lit by torches and candles, and her fellow students were so focused on their own notebooks, frantically scribbling to keep up with Beecham’s words, that no one paid her much mind.
Well, no one but Thrupp, the boy with moles and a smirk like that of a boar ready to charge. When it became clear that Hazel （or rather, George Hazelton） was the best in the class by far, Thrupp delighted in taking every opportunity to torment her. One morning, Hazel found her ink replaced with a small pool of blood. The next, there was a piece of brain pinned to her desk with a penknife. But even he couldn’t muster enough energy to really make Hazel’s life difficult, when he needed to be focused enough to keep up with the material.
The Physician’s Exams loomed, but there was another, more immediate threat: for all his welcoming bravado, Beecham was fanatical about culling the class if anyone fell behind. On day two, one poor boy forgot his quill and was kicked out. On day four, two boys were dropped from the course without ceremony because they were unable to identify the major systems of the body.
“You there! With the blue vest. Name me the symptoms of the Roman fever, Plaga Romanus. Nom de guerre, ‘the bricklayer’s fever,’ or ‘the sickness.’ Well?” Beecham had shouted the question at one of the students the previous week. The boy’s face went blank with terror. Hazel imagined it was exactly the same face one would make if they just happened to notice a lion running toward them full speed.