The parts of Hawthornden that Hazel liked best were the library—with its mottled green wallpaper and leather books and fireplace lit every afternoon—and the balcony off her bedroom, from which she could look into the tree-lined creek below and see only nature for miles. Her bedroom was on the castle’s south facade; she couldn’t see the smoke rising from the heart of Edinburgh, just an hour’s ride to the north, and so here, on the balcony, she could pretend she was alone in the world, an explorer standing at the precipice of the sum of human knowledge, and building up the courage to take a single step forward.
Hawthornden Castle was built on a cliffside, with ivy-covered stone walls that loomed over untamed Scottish woods and a thin stream that ran farther than Hazel had ever been able to follow. Her family had lived there for at least a hundred years on her father’s side. It had Sinnett history in its walls, in the char and grass and moss that clung to the ancient stones.
A handful of kitchen fires throughout the 1700s meant that most of the castle had been rebuilt on top of itself, brick atop stone. The only remnants of the castle’s original structure were the gates, at the front of the drive, and a cold stone dungeon built into the side of the hill, which had never been used in living memory—except as a threat when Mrs. Herberts caught Percy stealing pudding before tea, or when the footman, Charles, had promised to stay locked inside for a whole day on a dare but lasted no more than an hour.
Most of the time, it felt to Hazel as if she lived at Hawthornden by herself. Percy was usually outside playing, or at lessons. Her mother, still dressed in mourning, rarely left her bedroom, gliding along between the walls like a ghost of death in black. Sometimes it was lonely, but usually Hazel felt grateful for the solitude. Especially when she wanted to experiment.
The dead frog was small, and muddy brown. Its thin limbs, which had flopped in her palms like a loose doll when she plucked it from the footpath, were now stiff and unpleasantly tacky. But the frog was dead, and there was a storm in the air—it was perfect. Every piece was in place.
From behind a small rock on the balcony, Hazel pulled out the fireplace poker and the kitchen fork she had squirreled away weeks ago, waiting for this exact situation to present itself. Bernard had been infuriatingly vague about the type of metal the magician-scientist in Switzerland had used （“Was it brass? Just tell me, Bernard, what color was it?” “I told you, I don’t remember!”）， and so Hazel just decided to make do with the metal objects that seemed easy enough to pluck from the household without anyone noticing. The fireplace poker was from her father’s study, and even the servants didn’t bother going in that room anymore in the months since her father and his regiment had been posted on Saint Helena.
A distant groan of thunder echoed through the valley below. It was time. She would breach the world between life and death, using electricity to reanimate flesh. What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand? And didn’t that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?
Hazel delicately set the poker down on one side of the frog and then, with an air of solemn reverence, she slowly lowered the kitchen fork down to the other side.
Nothing happened.
She moved the fork and the poker closer to the frog, and then, impatiently, set them touching the frog’s skin. Was she supposed to—？ No, no, Bernard would have mentioned if the convict’s head had been impaled on a spike. When he came back from his grand tour, she had been breathless with questions about the demonstration he mentioned only in passing in his letter from Switzerland, a demonstration held by the son of the great scientist Galvini. Using electricity, the second Galvini had made frog legs dance and the severed head of a convict blink as if it were alive once again.
“It was frightening, really,” Bernard had said, bringing a cup of tea to his lips and beckoning for the servant to bring another ginger biscuit. “But marvelous, though, in its own strange way, don’t you think?”
Hazel did. Though Bernard had refused to talk about it any further （“Why must you be so morbid, Cousin!”）， Hazel found she could conjure up the details of the scene in her mind as easily as if she had been there herself—the man in a French-style jacket, standing onstage in a tiny, wood-lined theater, the red velvet curtains behind him heavy with dust. Hazel could see the string of frogs’ legs jerking up and down, dancing like cancan girls, before Galvini whipped the cloth off the main attraction: the head of a man who had been hanged. In Hazel’s imagination, his neck was cut low enough to show the purplish bruises where the rope had cut in.