“Thank you, Burgess. And thank you for all your help.”
Burgess gave a weak laugh. “Feels off that you’re the one thanking me, seeing as you’ve all but saved my life.”
“A treatment is good,” Hazel said. “A cure is better.”
“Well, I have no doubt it’ll be here sooner rather than later if Dr. Hazel Sinnett is on the case.”
“I’m not a doctor yet.”
“Give it a few hours.”
She gathered her quills, ink, and knives, and her Dr. Beecham’s Treatise, more for luck than anything else. “Has Jack come by recently?” Hazel asked Iona as she helped to lace her boots.
Iona shook her head. “Not for a few days, I’m afraid.” Then, seeing the nervous look on Hazel’s face, Iona continued, “Though there’s nothing to worry about with that lad. Could get himself out of any trouble, you know Jack. Slipperier than an adder, and twice as clever.”
Hazel could only manage a nod. Jack was fine. She needed to focus on the examination today.
Initially, she had planned on taking the examination dressed as George Hazleton; she had pulled out one of George’s best jackets for the occasion, and kept it in her clothing press so it greeted her every morning as a reminder of the task to come. But when the time came to get dressed in the morning, she hesitated. She wasn’t taking the examination as George Hazleton; she was taking it as Hazel Sinnett.
And so Iona helped her instead into a dress that had arrived from the seamstress only a few weeks earlier, one Hazel had yet to wear. The skirt was white muslin and lined with ribbon at the hem, before it cascaded into delicate layers at the ankles. The bodice was bloodred silk, with puffs of white linen at her shoulders. The neckline reached her chin, a reminder to keep it high.
“Don’t be late now,” Iona warned her as she finished lacing. “You’ve reminded me a dozen times, and I haven’t forgotten: it’s eight o’clock on the nose.”
Hazel straightened the cuffs of her gloves. “I won’t be late. Trust me.” She still remembered her first morning trying to sneak into Dr. Beecham’s surgical demonstration at the Anatomists’ Society, and being on the opposite side of a locked door when the bell rang out through the city.
There was still frost on the ground when she set out to the carriage, dew frozen solid in the night and crystallized. Hazel relished the crunch of her shoe on the grass. This was going to be a good day, she thought.
Her confidence lasted until the carriage finished its climb up the slope to Edinburgh’s Old Town; through its window, Hazel caught her first glimpse of other prospective physicians marching toward the examination room at the university. They were, as a whole, a serious group, men in dark coats and worn boots, with spectacles and expressions of intense concentration on their faces. They walked across the cobblestones gazing at their feet, brows furrowed. Hazel’s stomach clenched and her breakfast turned to bile in her throat. The rocking of the carriage was going to make her sick. “You can stop the carriage,” she called out to the driver. “I’ll walk from here.”
The cold greeted her as she opened the door—her dress was too thin for the December chill, and she had forgotten to bring a fur. Hazel walked at a quick clip to warm herself as she headed over the bridge and toward the university. No one paid her any mind as she whipped along the stone street, past shops smelling like warm meat and day-old ale, beggars curled under blankets under their eaves; past mutts with stiff coats of hair whipping their muscular tails in excitement at whatever scraps had been let out, children playing a game with cups and dice; past a man in a tall hat wheeling a veiled figure in a chair.
Hazel froze. The man and the chair disappeared behind a corner into an alley. How had Jeanette described it to them? Her dream of a veil. And then Munro had told the same story. He had described this, this exact scene, being wheeled through the city beneath a heavy black veil. No one on the street but Hazel had stopped or noticed anything unusual. To their eyes, it was an elderly widow in mourning, or an invalid spending a morning out of the house.
Hazel held her breath for a moment and watched as the man and the chair wheeled off the main street and into an alley, the close leading toward the Anatomists’ Society. Hazel stepped forward, unable to resist peeking around the corner. She saw the swish of a cape and a closing door to confirm what she already knew: whoever was in the wheelchair was being delivered to the operating theater.
A bell went off in her mind. Today was Monday. Baron Walford was getting his surgery today, at the Anatomists’ Society. Wasn’t that what he had said? What was happening behind that closed door?