She had plenty of time before the examination—she had set out so early that she could have walked from Hawthornden to the university and still been settled in her seat when the examination began, with time to fill her inkwell. There was surely no harm in just … poking her head in. Seeing what they were doing. It was certainly nothing. Baron Walford had been drunk at the dinner, anyway. He was probably just being fitted for a new glass eye, and the woman in the chair was … an elderly widow meeting her grandson, a visiting scholar.
She had time. She had plenty of time. Hazel wished Jack were here, able to talk sense into her, tell her if she was being ridiculous, if she should ignore the baron and the woman and stay focused. Stay focused on getting to the university, on the examination, on her future. But Jack wasn’t here; he was somewhere in the city without her, and it was just Hazel standing alone on the busy corner, biting at the flesh of her cuticles while she mentally played out each alternative.
The choice was made for her the moment she saw the wheelchair disappear behind the door, when her heart began pounding in her ears and her excitement and fear made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Hazel pulled off her hat, looked around to see if anyone was watching her, and disappeared into the small alley to the side of the building, where only a few months before, a boy she didn’t yet know as Jack Currer had shown her a secret entrance.
From Dr. Beecham’s Treatise on Anatomy: or, The Prevention and Cure of Modern Diseases （17th Edition, 1791） by Dr. William R. Beecham:
The purpose of a physician is to protect and serve his fellow man. That is the singular directive of those who commit themselves to this illustrious profession: help those in need. The purpose of study should be the expansion of knowledge, but never for its own sake. Leave knowledge for its own sake to the philosophers. A physician’s life is too short to waste it in idle academia—if he uses his mind, he should also be using his hands.
33
THE STONE HALLWAY WAS DARKER THAN Hazel remembered, and narrower. Spiderwebs clutched at her skirts, and she tried to suppress a sneeze from the dust that floated in the air, hovering in the thin rectangles of light that had managed to push through around the edges of the splintering door behind her. It became darker the farther Hazel walked, and colder. Ten steps along the hallway, she deeply regretted her decision; she should be sitting in the examination hall at the university, smirking at Thrupp’s taunts because she knew she could handle anything the examination threw at her. Her parchment would have been neat, her handwriting impeccable. Maybe she would have come first in the class. The minutes were ticking by.
She shook her head as if to banish the thoughts. She would still be able to make it. She had plenty of time. The floor began to slope downward slightly, and Hazel heard the quiet lilt of voices from the other side of a door she couldn’t see in the gloom.
“—means that you won’t feel a thing, I assure you.”
“—Gone through the procedure myself—”
“We chose this one because he’s young, see? Worth the extra thrippence, I promise ye that.”
Hazel turned the heavy metal knob and winced at the squeak. She waited for shouts, for the tempo or temperature of the murmurs on the stage to change, but they hadn’t heard her. Hazel opened the door an inch, just enough to let a crack of light through, and then, when there was no reaction from the men on the stage, she opened the door far enough to allow her to turn sideways and slip through.
The smell of straw hit her first—fresh straw had been deposited on the floor of the stage and beneath the risers, presumably to soak up blood. Hazel gave silent thanks for all the etiquette lessons her mother had insisted upon to teach her quiet, ladylike steps, and she crept slow as a sigh through the shadows as far as she dared.
Without the camouflaging benefit of a hundred men’s legs hanging off the stands, Hazel was forced to stay far back, close enough to make out the scene on the stage in rough shapes only. There was a man sitting up on a surgical bed, talking jovially. It was his voice that echoed through the hall. The veiled body was still in its chair, with the man in the tall hat standing menacingly over its shoulder. And in the center of the stage of the operating theater, brandishing the blue bottle of ethereum in one hand and a lace handkerchief in the other, was a doctor.
The doctor wore a leather butcher’s apron, and a strange contraption covered his face. The contraption looked like goggles, but instead of two pieces of glass, it had only one. One circular magnifying glass in the center of the doctor’s face, concealing his identity and turning him into a creature out of Greek mythology. There he was: the one-eyed man Jeanette had dreamed about, a distorted cyclops with a round glass eye set in brass. His magnified iris flashed blue and undulated through the glass like ocean water.