“Is that…？” Hazel asked without looking backward, trepidation in her voice.
“Oh. Oh!” Jack pulled away the handle of one of his trowels from where it had pressed into her back. He blushed and cursed himself under his breath, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.
Saint Dwynwen’s rose from the horizon like smoke, a small iron-colored building with a thin, twisted spire. “We should get off the horses here,” Jack whispered. “Go the rest of the way on foot.”
Hazel nodded. She slipped gracefully off her horse’s back and generously extended a hand to Jack, who took it and still managed to land with a thump next to her. They were surrounded by forest, damp moss and mud beneath their boots. Hazel tied the horses to a nearby branch while Jack gathered the equipment from the cart: two spades, a grimy sheet, and a long rope. “I’m warning you: this isn’t a pleasant business.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t expect pleasant.” Jack could see the glint of her sly smile in the shadows.
The two of them set out toward the back of the church, where the mausoleums and tombs stood in warning like silent sentinels. When they made it to the spiked kirkyard fence, Jack vaulted it immediately, out of habit. Hazel stood on the other side. “It’s easier than it looks,” Jack whispered, glancing at the little cottage parish house with a single candle lit in the window to make sure no one was coming. “If you can climb onto that beast of a horse, I promise you can jump this fence, truly.”
Hazel hesitated, and for half a moment, Jack was convinced this was all a mistake, bringing Hazel here, that she was going to get them caught or cry out—but then she had done it. She had jumped the fence without even catching the hem of her trousers.
“So where’s the grave?” she said, catching her breath.
Now Jack was grinning. He tilted his head and led the way toward the southeastern corner of the cemetery, where he had seen the funeral gathering a few days prior. Unfortunately, in the dark, with his head half scrambled with fear and the lingering smell of Hazel’s hair, Jack found the fresh grave much harder to locate than he had planned on.
“I swear, it’s somewhere around here,” Jack whispered. The longer they were here, the riskier it became. The trick to being a good resurrection man was getting in, and getting out, before a mourner half a yard away would even know that you were there.
Hazel walked slowly, trying to make out the names carved onto the gravestones. She stood in front of each one, her mouth silently making out the shapes of their names. “So many children,” she said quietly.
And so many deaths in 1815, the year the fever had swept through Edinburgh without mercy, killing rich and poor alike, nobles and their servants. It was a slow illness often, and a brutal one, so contagious in the hours before death that families were known to leave the suffering alone in their homes, weeping and pawing at the windows, begging for someone, anyone, to come and hold them while they died. And it struck children, and young men and women. That was the illness’s true cruelty: it often claimed those who had not yet had a chance to live.
“It’s here,” Jack whispered. He stood before a mound of unsettled earth, damp and recently dug, and a tiny wooden cross.
Hazel joined him and grabbed one of the spades. “So now we dig,” she said.
“Now we dig.”
They worked in silence for the better part of an hour. Every few minutes, Jack would lift his head to make sure the parish was still quiet, but Hazel, to his surprise, was an astonishingly diligent worker. She scarcely lifted her head, working methodically and creating a hypnotic rhythm: the sound of her spade scraping through the earth, and then the gentle pat of the soil being deposited on the surface. Scratch. Pat. Scratch. Pat. Scratch. Pat.
And then a sound broke the rhythm—something distant, in the woods. A crunching of leaves. Maybe the clawing of a small animal against the tree bark. Hazel didn’t notice, her spade continuing its task at pace, but Jack lifted his head. The trees were too dark to make anything out. Just the horses, he told himself. Had to be the horses. He’d been doing this long enough not to get spooked by shadows.
A more immediate noise hit them: metal against wood, the sound of Hazel’s spade vibrating against the wooden coffin. “All right,” Jack said, “I’m going to break it now.”
Hazel nodded and shielded her eyes from any errant slivers of wood as Jack lifted his spade aloft and brought it down with a single confident stroke onto the coffin lid. It snapped like a pistol shot. Jack threw his spade over the side of the hole they had dug and back onto the grass, then pulled himself up to follow it. “Throw me the piece from the top of the casket. Then I’m going to lower you down some rope. Wrap it around his legs, then I’ll do the heavy lifting.”