“Morning, Father!” Jack said cheerfully. “Lovely morning. Bit of a fog, though you won’t hear any complaining from me.”
“I can explain,” Hazel said.
The priest’s eyes widened in terror. He looked at the mutilated corpse lying naked on the ground, and then back at Hazel and Jack, and then back at the body, and back at them. “Be gone, unholy demons!” he shouted. “Be gone, ye the dead, from this world of the living!” He bent his ancient knees and picked up a clod of dirt. He flung it at Jack and Hazel. “Shoo! Shoo! This be holy and consecrated ground. Flee!”
Hazel lifted her hands to protect her eyes. “Sir—Father, this is all a misunderstanding—”
But Jack interrupted: “Yes! We be the undead woken! And we’ll be”—he tugged on Hazel’s arm—“going now. Arghhhh!”—he wiggled his arms in the air—“Your holiness is just too powerful for us!” And then he hissed like a snake.
Before either of them could see the priest’s reaction, they turned and raced toward the trees. Mercifully, Miss Rosalind was still waiting for them, cranky and ready for her next meal, but happy enough to take the pair of them back to Hawthornden.
Someone, three someones, had been walking in the graveyard at night, someone was taking resurrection men, and something horrible had happened to a dead man’s eyes—but Hazel couldn’t think about any of that now. The thoughts swirled in her brain and dissolved in her exhaustion like cream being stirred into weak tea. All she could manage at the moment was staying upright and awake on Miss Rosalind with Jack Currer’s hands on her waist, fantasizing about her bed with coals warming the sheets, and Cook’s freshly baked fish pie, and the way Jack’s lips had felt on hers.
She had kissed Jack Currer in a grave, and he had kissed her back, and even with everything else they had faced, that moment was the hardest Hazel’s heart had beaten the entire night.
When Hazel made it back to the main house of Hawthornden Castle, opening the creaking wooden door as silently as she could, she found Charles asleep on the velvet bench in the hall by the library door. Iona was fast asleep right beside him, with her head leaning on his shoulder. Hazel closed the door slowly and took off her boots so she could sneak up to bed without waking them.
24
WITHOUT A FRESH BODY TO STUDY, Hazel devoted all her time and attention to diagramming and preserving the organs of the one body she and Jack had successfully retrieved. She pulled samples from every one of its fever sores and submerged the scabs in various solutions: alcohol, tonics, salt, and—on a whim—powdered wortflower root.
But one body wouldn’t suffice if she wanted to pass the Royal Physician’s Examination. Hazel ordered copies of the latest books on physiology from Paris and Philadelphia and Rome and spent as many hours as she could studying them. She read and reread the edition of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise that Dr. Beecham had given her so often the pages became soft from the oils of her fingers. She memorized the notes in the margins, mostly small, meaningless annotations. （Small venous system written beside a diagram of the gallbladder; Mercury tonic? on the page about treating the common cold.）
But still, Hazel was finding it more and more difficult to focus. It seemed with every blink came another nightmarish image of eyes sewn open in blind horror, thick black string pulled through paper-thin eyelids. Hazel read into the small hours to stave off nightmares. When she wasn’t thinking of the gruesome body, she was thinking of Jack’s lips and the way her heart had flipped in her chest when he was pressed against her. Neither of those things would help her pass the examination. She couldn’t let herself dwell on them, not for the time being.
And so Hazel held books while walking and read in bed late at night until the tapers burned themselves to stubs. On more than one occasion, Iona had to replace the book in Hazel’s hands at breakfast with a piece of toast to ensure that Hazel was well fed enough. Iona also insisted that Hazel go to Princes Street Gardens on what might be the final reasonably nice day of the year, when the weak sun managed to eke out a bit of warmth in a sleet-gray sky. “Come on, miss,” she said, already preparing Hazel’s boots. “You can’t stay cooped up here all winter. You can take your books down to the gardens! Now, won’t that be nice?”
“Iona, my books are heavy. They weigh a ton. I couldn’t possibly haul them out to an appropriately pleasant spot on the grass—the horses wouldn’t be able to pull me and my books in the carriage to get there.”