Straine interrupted her with another chilling laugh. “You do take me for a fool then, Miss Sinnett. My, what a shame. I might have thought you were smarter than that after all. No, unlike some of my more regrettable colleagues, I wouldn’t object to teaching the rare woman who had a mind capable of natural philosophy and the study of the body. Yes, on the whole, the female brain is smaller, more susceptible to hysterics and emotion, less inclined to reason. But there’s no reason to believe that a specimen might not emerge from the female sex able enough to be taught.”
There was a chance then! Was this an olive branch? Was there a possibility that Straine saw Hazel as that exception? Maybe if she shed her costume and begged forgiveness, she could continue in his class. She opened her mouth to begin her apology, but before the word was formed, Straine continued.
“No, I refuse to teach women for a simple reason: I do not waste my time nor energy on dilletantes. There is no place in our world for a woman to practice medicine, Miss Sinnett, sad as that might make you. Another consequence of growing up without the glow of privilege is that one becomes quick to dispel illusion and fantasy. No hospital will hire a female surgeon, nor any university. Even less willing, I imagine, would be a patient to suffer beneath the knife of a woman. So you have come here under the foolish pretense that you are not a niece to the Viscount Almont, daughter of a lord, that you will not marry some equally frivolous child of society and devote the remainder of your life to bearing his brood and holding dinner parties. Am I incorrect, Miss Sinnett?”
Hazel didn’t know what to say. He continued to stare at her. His face had no hint of kindness or mercy; it was a cruel face lined with something that might have been close to pity.
“Perhaps you attended this class with good intentions. Perhaps you told yourself it wasn’t a lark, and perhaps you even believed it. But I do not waste my time on students who will not go on to be doctors, regardless of their sex. Unfortunately for you, Miss Sinnett, your sex precludes it. Although it seems to me that your intelligence would have precluded it as well. Do not set foot in my classroom again.”
Hazel could feel her eyes sting with tears. She tried to blink them back, but it wasn’t working. Her eyes became hot and red, and a tear caught on her cheek.
“Do not attempt to stifle your tears on my account,” Straine said. “Women have such trouble controlling their emotions. You’re dismissed, Miss Sinnett.”
The tears threatened to become sobs. Hazel’s brain swam with a thousand things she might say—excuses, insults, retorts—but they all dissolved when she tried to speak. She stood as if bolted to the floor, while Straine turned back to his parchment and made a few notes, working as if she weren’t there. She stood for what might have been only five seconds or an eternity before she ran from the hall. She was in a stupor for the ride back to Hawthornden, made dizzy with shame and embarrassment and anger all at once. It was only when she was finally in her bedchamber, when she cast George’s clothes off and threw them across the room, that her sobs finally escaped her chest. She keeled over then, naked but for her chemise, and wept.
14
HAZEL DIDN’T LEAVE HER BEDROOM UNTIL the sun was already high. Her room was stuffy and hot. She had sweated in the night, which left her chemise clammy. Iona had left tea and toast on a tray by the door, but it was impossible to know how long ago that was; the tea had long since gone cold and the toast soggy. Hazel forced herself upright with a moan as the memories of the previous day flooded back. It was the look in Dr. Straine’s eye that stuck with her, an expression she couldn’t quite parse. At the time, she had thought it might be pity, but now when she conjured it back, it seemed closer to resentment. He resented her, and everything she represented, simple as that.
Could she blame him? Who was she? The rich daughter of a respectable lord and captain of the Royal Navy, niece of one viscount and future wife of his heir. She had had a negligent mother who let Hazel nurture her childlike fascination with physiology while Lady Sinnett was more focused on protecting the heir, and an absent father with a library he left at home. No matter how much Hazel read, however naturally the study of the body came to her, Dr. Straine was right.
Her entire future would be attending balls down in London and preparing menus for her husband’s guests at Almont House. If her husband permitted it, she might be allowed to hold a salon and invite prominent thinkers into their parlor, but they would be the men of discovery and action. It would be her guests who came with their stories and ideas. Hazel would be seated neatly on a divan, listening. That was the closest she would come to the world of science—the edge of the bubble, permitted to listen and serve tea and smile gamely and offer her thoughts only if they were disguised as harmless witticisms. Her path was finite and certain. Educating her in anatomy would be like teaching a pig to read before the slaughter.