“You were amazing in there,” he said. “The things you do, the things you’re capable of. It’s just—you’re amazing.”
Hazel looked up but stayed sitting on the shore. “I don’t know what I’m doing at all. Jack, I was terrified.”
“What? Terrified?”
Hazel nodded. “A whole life in my hands? What if I had messed it up? What if I had hurt the baby, or hurt Isabella? I would—I don’t even know what I would do. How would I live with that?”
Jack sat down next to her and looked out at the thin trickling of the water over the rocks. The castle cast a dark shadow over them. The day after the birth, they had managed to bring Isabella and the baby up to the main house, where Isabella could sleep in George’s old room. “You did everything perfectly,” Jack said. “The baby is perfect.”
“This time,” Hazel said. She paused, and Jack was wondering whether he had made a mistake in coming down to keep her company when Hazel spoke again. “I used to be so confident. That’s the funny thing: I used to think that I knew everything, that I could do anything. And then you see it firsthand, and you realize how thin the line is between everything being all right and everything being ruined forever and you just become suddenly aware that you know nothing. I’m just a silly little girl playing dress-up and pretending. I haven’t even passed the Physician’s Examination. What do I think I’m doing?”
Jack took Hazel’s hand in his. Hers was cold, almost waxy. White and pale. “Hazel,” he said softly. “You are the most brilliant person I’ve ever met in my life. You’re incredible.”
“I’m scared,” Hazel said.
“Good,” Jack said. “That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with being scared.”
Hazel lowered her head onto Jack’s chest, and he extended his arm around her. It began to rain then, a mist that started so softly it almost felt like pinpricks. “Let’s get in out of the rain,” Jack said, and helped Hazel to her feet. He started guiding her up the path toward the castle, but Hazel pulled away.
“No,” she said. “Not quite yet.”
Hazel and Jack walked toward the stables, where they were met with air that was warm and dry, smelling pleasantly of straw.
They pulled a pair of horse blankets from the shelves and sat under the barn’s roof with its doors open, watching the rain come down as the sky darkened above the outline of Hawthornden Castle’s stone parapet. The sun was already setting, the short days of winter having arrived in Edinburgh along with bitterly cold wind.
Hazel pressed her hands inside Jack’s jacket to warm them. “I still can’t get warm,” she whispered.
Jack leaned in to kiss her then, planting his lips so tenderly on hers that they felt more shadow than flesh. And then she kissed him back, and soon they were kissing so deeply that for a moment it didn’t feel as though they were two separate people at all. It had begun to rain harder outside the stable’s rickety wooden frame, but neither of them cared. Jack pressed Hazel against a beam and pulled the pins from her hair until her curls fell past her shoulders. He pressed his face into her hair and breathed in deeply, and then he ran a finger along the curve of her cheek. “Dear Lord in heaven,” he whispered. “You’re so beautiful, Hazel Sinnett.”
“No one has ever told me that I’m beautiful before,” Hazel said. She hadn’t even realized it was true until she said it out loud.
Jack stood with his hands on either side of her face and stared at her for a few heartbeats. Then he leaned in and softly kissed both her eyelids.
“Someone should tell you that you’re beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Wednesdays. And at teatime. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and the evening before Christmas Eve, and on Easter. He should tell you on Guy Fawkes Night and on New Year’s, and on the eighth of August, just because.” He kissed her lips once more, gently, and then pulled away and gazed into her eyes. “Hazel Sinnett, you are the most miraculous creature I have ever come across, and I am going to be thinking about how beautiful you are until the day I die.”
27
HAZEL’S FIRST DEATH CAME A WEEK later, a Roman fever patient who fell asleep one night after refusing the cool water Hazel had offered him, and never woke up. She did not cry as she wrapped him in sheets and pulled him outside to the cart on the path to the laboratory dungeon.