Hazel nodded her silent assent. She twisted the piece of broken lid free and handed it off, and then assessed what she had revealed: a pair of feet in tattered brown shoes with barely enough material to hold them together, and the vile smell of putrefaction and death. A maggot wriggled between the corpse’s toes, and Hazel gagged into her sleeve. “I wish I could say you get used to that,” Jack whispered, shielding his own nose.
As he dropped the rope down to Hazel, he glanced back at the woods, where he thought he had seen the shadow. There was movement there. Something impossible to make out. Maybe just an animal, a fox skulking amid the mossy undergrowth. All Jack could do now was finish the job quickly and get out.
Hazel wound the rope around the body’s ankles several times, and then tied it off in a tight square knot. “Ready.”
Jack pulled, and a spray of soil came down across Hazel’s face from where the rope slid up the side of the grave. Hazel tried to help guide the body up and out of the casket, through the splintery gap in the wood, but Jack did most of the physical labor, pulling steadily up and away until the body slithered, feetfirst, back to the living world—six feet up.
Jack lowered a hand then to help Hazel up. “Now we have to undress him, make sure we don’t bring any of his clothes with us. We’re not thieves, after all.”
They stood over the body when their task was complete, the darkness protecting the dead stranger’s modesty. “This is strange,” Hazel said. “It feels like we’re at a funeral.”
“You get used to it,” Jack said, already starting the process of wrapping the body in the sheet. He hoisted the body over his shoulder with ease. Hazel had thought Jack was all sharp edges and thin lines, but he was surprisingly strong. He lowered the body into the cart tenderly and then gestured to Hazel and the horse. “After you, m’lady.”
Hazel hoisted herself onto Miss Rosalind’s saddle, then lowered her hand to help Jack up behind her.
They made it back to Hawthornden just as the sky began to lighten into misty gray. Jack followed Hazel into her dungeon and deposited the body onto her table.
“Would you like to stay for a cup of tea or something?” Hazel said after they had stood in the dim half light for a few seconds. “We can walk up to the castle; I’m sure Cook will be up if you want some breakfast.”
Jack shook his head. He pushed his hair away from his face. “Nah, I best be getting back to town,” he said. “On foot.”
“Oh. All right, then.” Hazel looked down at the body, still wrapped in Jack’s sheet. “I’ll need more than one body, I think,” she said. “If there’s another one that died of the fever that you hear about.”
“No shortage of those,” Jack said. Hazel looked up at him, alarmed to see that he was smiling. “Let’s say same time next week.”
23
TO HAZEL’S SURPRISE, JACK ARRIVED BACK at Hawthornden sooner than Sunday night. Just a few days after their successful dig, Hazel saw him standing sheepishly by the stables when she came out after breakfast for her walk.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that if you happened to be free today, you might show me how to ride. I’m not expecting to be able to learn in one go, especially if you put me on a brute like that Beetle—whatever his name was.”
“Betelgeuse,” Hazel said, trying to hold back her smile as she approached. “One of the brightest stars in the night sky visible to the naked eye, they say.”
“And impossible high up, just like the horse.”
Hazel had already entered the stable and brought the tall black Arabian out of his stall. The pair of them approached Jack, who began to look as though he regretted his decision to revisit riding.
If Betelgeuse were capable of smirking, that’s exactly what the horse would have done as it gazed down at Jack with a look in his eye that couldn’t be construed as anything other than a challenge. Jack raised his arm as if to pet the horse, and then thinking better of it, used his already lifted hand to tidy his hair, pretending that was what he had intended the entire time.
“So,” Hazel said, “we’re going to want the horse to get to know you.”
“I feel like we already had a fairly intimate introduction,” Jack said.
“No sudden movements. Move very slowly. Reach out your hand—yes, very good, just like that, and now walk all the way around him, but keep your hand on him the whole time. He needs to know where you are.”
Jack obeyed, feeling slightly silly walking around the horse while Hazel watched.