Her heart pounded, and she gave thanks for the dim gas lamps and torchlight that hid her blush. Hazel cleared her throat. “So, the specimen. It can go on the table.” She used the knife in her hand to gesture.
“Right you are.” Jack pulled his eyes from hers and moved toward the wheelbarrow.
She averted her eyes as Jack maneuvered the corpse, as he laid its limbs neatly into position so that it might only have been sleeping under a shroud. “Sheet on or off?”
“Off,” Hazel said. “Might as well be off. I’m going to be looking anyway. How much do I owe you?” She pulled a coin purse from beneath her apron. “Six guineas, I think?”
“It’s a fresh corpse, dug it up just tonight! Ten guineas.”
“Just because you dug it up tonight doesn’t mean it was buried tonight. Certainly doesn’t smell like it. Seven guineas.”
“Nine, or I take it straight back to the Old Town and give it to the barber on Haymarket Street. He’s a good customer, always pays what I ask.”
“Eight guineas, and three shillings,” Hazel said. She held out the heavy coins in the palm of her hand.
Jack hesitated, and then swiped them into his own hand. “Deal.”
Once Jack had secured the money in his pocket, he withdrew the sheet with a flourish and revealed the shriveled corpse beneath: a young woman, shrunken and waxy. The smell dominated the dungeon now, sickly sweet rotting meat and eggs gone bad, a warm larval musk.
“Here,” Hazel said, offering Jack an orange filled with cloves. She was already holding one up to her own nose. “It helps with the smell.”
Jack accepted gratefully. “Did you read about this in a book too?”
“Actually, I did,” Hazel said.
The body had cold blue eyelids and hair like straw. If Hazel had to guess, she would have said that the two of them were exactly the same age. The woman—the girl—had lived a hard life, Hazel could see that, reading her body as one does a book. Her feet were frostbitten and mangled at the soles from poor shoes. Her fingernails were yellow and broken. She had bruises running up every limb. At the back of her head, there was a section where her straw-yellow hair had been shaved, revealing the scars and circular suction marks from a wet-cupping operation. The girl had gone into a hospital for the poor, and they had treated her by sucking blood from the back of her skull with knives and hot glasses. Hazel had never seen it done, but she had read about it. Seeing the scars in person—bright purple suction bruises in perfect circles, like the woman had wrestled with a terrifying deep-sea creature—made the procedure seem far more brutal than Hazel had imagined it to be from the pages of her books.
The girl had another scar, too, running at least thirty centimeters down the center of her chest between her breasts, sewn up tight by stitches so neat they were almost invisible. Hazel wondered what ailment had been addressed. Perhaps someone had tried to save her life.
Jack had been paid, but he still lingered, looking over Hazel’s shoulder at the corpse. “Did she—you know—was it the fever?”
“The Roman fever?” Hazel said, perplexed.
Jack nodded. He had heard the rumors. The priest who spoke over her body at the burial had prayed to God that they would be delivered a cure.
“No,” Hazel said, “definitely not.”
Jack came closer. “How do you know? It’s what everyone’s saying she died of!”
“Really? No, here, look—” Hazel used the sheet to tilt the body away from them, to show Jack the corpse’s smooth back. “No buboes. No boils at all. That’s what the Roman fever is named for.”
“Not because it came from Rome?” Jack had heard more than one stagehand at Le Grand Leon curse “those damn Eye-talians” for the sickness that threatened their business.
“No, certainly not. It’s because the primary symptom, after the fever, is these boils, filled with blood. And then they burst and look like wounds from a stabbing. Like Julius Caesar on the steps of the Senate. Rome. Plaga Romanus.”
“From a book?” Jack said.
“Actually, that one I know firsthand.”
Jack inched half a step closer. “So,” he said, “can you tell what she died from?”
In answer, Hazel lifted her largest knife and made a long incision vertically down the corpse’s chest, just as she had seen Dr. Straine do in class. She paused, looking down in disbelief. She looked up at Jack, down at the body, and then up at Jack again. “As it happens,” Hazel said, “I can tell you exactly what she died from. She doesn’t have a heart.”