“A heartbeat? Well, yeah, she’s dead—I could’ve told you that much.”
“No,” Hazel said. “Look. She literally doesn’t have a heart.”
Jack looked into the yawning void of the body’s chest. It was all so red, and so wet, he didn’t know what he was looking for.
“Just there.” Hazel gestured with the knife, toward the center of the woman’s chest. “Beneath the rib cage. In front of the lungs.”
“I don’t see anything,” Jack said.
“That’s sort of the point.”
The heart was gone. In its place, nothing. Just the vacuum of other viscera and darkness glowing red by candlelight. The veins had been crudely cauterized, the larger arteries sewn shut. No animal had eaten the heart from her chest; it was stolen.
“So,” Jack said, leaning against the damp dungeon wall to steady himself, and nearly singeing his jacket on a torch, “Someone cut her open, and—and—cut her heart out? Jesus, why?”
Hazel looked down at the body. Even with her chest pulled open, the dead woman somehow looked serene. “Maybe she had enemies. Do you know who she was? Her name or anything?”
Jack shook his head. It had been too dark in the kirkyard to get a good look at the gravestone.
“Maybe it was an accident,” Hazel said softly. She glanced back at the scars from the body’s wet-cupping. “Maybe she was brought to the poor hospital and someone was trying to save her but didn’t know how.”
“Save her from what?”
Hazel could only shrug her shoulders.
Jack wanted to stay. He couldn’t explain it—he wished there were a reason for him to linger, to press his body up close against Hazel’s and breathe in the metallic smell of lightning that clung to her, a peculiar smell mixed with bergamot and castile soap. He wanted to watch her hands, deft and gloveless, do their work. Her face was stone, deep in concentration, impossibly beautiful in the sharpness of its planes.
“So I’ll just be off now,” Jack forced himself to say. He lifted the cloved orange to hand it back to her, but Hazel waved him off.
“Keep it, for next time.”
“There’s going to be a next time?” Jack asked.
“Are you turning down a paying customer, Jack Currer?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I just think I should probably ask the lady what she’s planning on doing with these dead bodies.”
“I thought that would be perfectly obvious by now,” Hazel said. “I’m studying.”
Jack opened his mouth to reply, but just sighed, shaking his head in cheerful disbelief.
He maneuvered the wheelbarrow back toward the small door and the inky black grass beyond it.
“Jack, I need a body that actually did have the fever … if you can find one. I want to examine it. I want to see if I can cure it.” She hadn’t admitted out loud, not even to herself, that curing the Roman fever was indeed her ambition.
Jack didn’t scoff or laugh at her. He just nodded.
Hazel pressed another few coins into his hand. “Payment,” she said. “In advance.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Hazel turned back to the body.
Jack stood in the doorway and watched as she took several deep breaths to steel herself and then began to make a slow incision across the corpse’s scalp. Hazel didn’t look up from the brain she had just unsheathed, its milky-gray curves visible beneath a sliver of bone-white skull.
“Goodbye, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said, pulling the creaking door closed behind him. The hinges clanged.
Jack had already made his way several steps along the garden path when he heard her whispered call back to him through the darkness: “Goodbye, Jack Currer.”
19
THE GENTLE KNOCKING STARTLED HAZEL OUT of her hypnotic focus. She was dissecting a stomach to see if she could diagram its blood vessels. She dismissed the noise, thinking it must be the sound of a small bird, one of the small black ones that chittered around the trees along the drive, but then the rapping returned, a little more frantic. Knock, knock, knock!
“Miss!” It was the hushed and panicked whisper of Iona. There was another round of knocking. “Miss, please.”
Hazel sighed and wiped a small scalpel on her apron. She had been using it to pull apart the layers of the stomach lining and she had been making excellent progress. But reluctantly, she trudged to the door, realizing only as she moved how sore her neck and shoulders were. She must have been at work for hours, so focused on the task in front of her that the time had slipped away. Hazel cracked open the door, astonished to find that there was daylight on the other side.