The door creaked inward, revealing a sliver of overcast gray sky and Jack, alone. “There you are. Is the body out front? Broken wheelbarrow, I suppose. Marvelous, just marvelous. If we need an extra pair of hands to carry the body, I can go get Charles, but I’d prefer if we just handled it ourselves.”
Jack didn’t look up from the earthen floor.
“What?”
“There’s no body. I didn’t go last night.”
“Sorry?”
Jack’s shoulders lifted to his ears. He looked as though he would rather be anywhere but there. Hazel noticed the deep purple shadows beneath his eyes. “There’s no body,” he said again, simply.
Hazel’s eyebrows knitted together, but she forced herself to remain composed. “When will I be able to expect the body, then? One with the fever.”
“There ain’t going to be any more bodies.” He looked away and showed a heavy bruise across his left cheek.
Before she could think better of it, Hazel strode forward and lifted Jack’s face in her hands. Jack’s hair was particularly lank and dull, and his eyes were flat.
His work as a resurrection man kept him up nights often; he was accustomed to going hours without sleep. But the previous night had been different. The exhaustion had started in his soul and crept outward. He had counted the seconds until sunrise from his paillasse in the risers at Le Grand Leon, willing his eyes to shut, not being able to force them to stay that way.
Jack jerked his chin away from Hazel’s hands and shrugged his jacket higher onto his shoulders.
“I don’t understand,” Hazel said resolutely. “I paid you in advance. You’ve only given me one body. If I’m to cure the fever—let alone pass the Physician’s Examination—I’m going to need at least several—”
“Well, you can find yourself another resurrection man, then, can’t you now.”
Hazel gave a barking laugh. “It’s not as if you advertise in the evening newspapers.”
Jack didn’t smile. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, and I have your money back here if you want it.” From deep in his pocket, he pulled out some coins, gave them a cursory glance, and then dropped them onto the wooden table, where Hazel had been expecting a corpse. “But I can’t get you any more bodies, at least not until—” Jack didn’t know how he was supposed to finish that sentence.
“Until what?”
Jack sighed. “My partner—er, or, he’s not really a partner, more like a colleague, really. Munro. He’s, well, missing. He went on a dig the other night, few nights back—alone, I thought, but maybe not—and anyways, he didn’t come back.”
Hazel gazed at him quizzically. “Well, maybe he made other plans. Left town. Visiting some family.”
“He wouldn’t do that without saying goodbye. And he’s not the first one, is the thing. Resurrection men going missing more often than not these days.”
“You think someone is killing resurrection men?”
“No, I don’t—I mean, it’s probably coppers cracking down. One of us probably accidentally got the body of a wealthy somebody or his wife, and now the police want all our heads to make him happy. These sorts of things happen for a bit, lawmen getting overeager. They lose interest in us soon enough.”
He almost mentioned the story Munro had told him, months back, about the three strange men who had approached him after a resurrection. At the time, Jack had thought it was just one of Munro’s tall tales, the type of ghost story he spread to make himself seem tougher and more interesting, like how he also claimed he could shoot a sparrow with a pistol at sixty paces. Jack had made fun of him for it, and Munro was embarrassed and bought the next round.
“But, anyways,” Jack continued, “it’s just too risky to go alone now, and I don’t have a lookout, so unless I want to join Munro in a cell or, or wherever he is, that’s it for now.”
Hazel picked up the coins Jack had refunded her. She ran her fingers along the metal edges. “What if you didn’t have to go alone?” she said carefully. “Would you do another dig, for a body, if you did have a partner?”
“I suppose,” Jack said.
“Well, lovely. We’ll go tonight, then.” Hazel strolled past him, out of the dungeon. “And I’ll be a very generous partner, let you keep all the money. Really, I should be asking for half.”
Hazel was on the garden path and already halfway back to the castle before Jack broke from his astonished daze and caught up to her. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait. That’s madness. I’m not doing a dig with a lady.”