Hazel looked over to the corner of her room that she thought of as her own little scientific library and laboratory: the divan next to the balcony, invisible under towering stacks of books she had pulled from her father’s office. Certainly there was Dr. Beecham’s Treatise, but also Modern Studies in Chemistry: A History of the Royal Physician in Practice, as well as Home Remedies, 1802. That corner was also where Hazel kept her notebooks—stacks of them, years’ worth of scribbling, mostly nonsense, most probably illegible—and her favorite specimens. There were butterflies secured to boards with sewing needles, their wings trapped in full extension. A taxidermy hawk sat on the mantel, a gift some distant cousin had once given to George, which he eagerly passed along to Hazel when he saw the way she’d stared at it. It was the beak Hazel couldn’t stop staring at. The bird was dead （and, if Hazel was being honest, only mediocrely stuffed）， but its beak was still monstrously sharp, like the bird could choose to swoop down from Hazel’s mantel at any moment to dissect a mouse for supper.
Now all of it looked pathetic. The books, the specimens she had gathered, the medicinal herbs she had picked from the garden and labeled so neatly, the notebooks—just looking at it all made Hazel sick. Before she could talk herself out of it, she flung the blanket from her bed, walked over to her laboratory corner, picked up a butterfly imprisoned within a glass case, and smashed it on the floor.
Her heart pounded. It felt good to destroy something. She did it again, with another case, this time containing an Egyptian beetle her father had brought back for her. It shattered against the floor in shards, with bits of glass glistening like gemstones in the carpet. Hazel brought her arm across a pile of books and threw them all to the ground. She tore pages from her notebooks in fistfuls. The broken glass was everywhere now, pricking her feet, and while she could see blood spots emerging on her legs, she barely felt any pain at all. Her ears rang with an echoing sound of laughter that she realized with a shock was her own.
It was useless, pointless, foolish. Humiliating. She had been so proud of reenacting the Galvini experiment that Bernard had described to her, so proud of performing a parlor trick. It wasn’t anything novel or helpful to anyone. She hadn’t contributed to the world. She had made a frog dance for her own amusement. She had been the dancing frog all along. How diverting! Look, quick, come see: a woman who fancies reading about blood and gore! Pay your tuppence, go inside, she’ll even pretend she’s going to be a surgeon someday! Don’t worry if she stains her skirts with bile—one of her servants will clean it off for her. Her father will buy her another gown. Pay another ha’penny, and you can see her in a man’s jacket!
Hazel continued tearing through her books until she had an armful of crumpled pages. She kicked open the door to the balcony, and before she thought better of it, she threw all of it over the railing, into the ravine far below.
The pages separated in the air, some caught by the wind. For a moment they were suspended, flying like a flock of broken birds. And then they fell. Hazel watched until the pages disappeared beneath the canopy of foliage.
Hazel returned to her room and saw with fresh eyes the damage she had done. The floor was strewn with bits of broken glass, with pieces of insects and feathers. A bottle of ink had spilled on her dressing gown; a stain black as oil was seeping up from the hem. Her copy of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise was splayed open on a bust of David Hume.
Iona stood in the doorway, her face a mask of shock and horror. “Miss!” she said.
“I’m so sorry, Iona.” Hazel gingerly pulled a stray pen from where it had embedded itself like an arrow in a portrait of her great-grandfather. “That must have made such an awful racket below.”
“Your feet, miss!”
Hazel looked down and understood why Iona had looked so horrified. Her feet were red, as if she were wearing a pair of colored stockings, covered in blood. “It doesn’t hurt so bad as all that. I’ll wash them in the tub and be right as rain. And I’ll clean all this up. I am sorry. I must have—temporarily lost my mind.”
Iona chewed at a nail nervously. “Miss, your— I mean, Lord Bernard Almont, is at the door for you.”
“Bernard? Now? Whatever for?”
“I can’t say, miss.”
Hazel examined herself herself in the looking glass. She was still wearing her chemise, which was stuck to her in places with sweat. Her hair was half down and wild without a bonnet, knotted and matted and flat from sleep. Her hands were covered in ink and blood, scraped all over as though with a schoolboy’s pen nib. “Please tell Bernard—er, his Lordship—that I’m indisposed at the moment, and that I will call on him later this week.”