“The ethereum is the key here, my lord. Perhaps you saw my demonstration earlier in the season?”
The figure on the bed rose on its elbows. “I can’t say I did, Doctor.”
The doctor wet the handkerchief with the iridescent blue liquid. “Well, the effect is quite remarkable. I find that patients have likened it to a good night’s sleep. You wake up in a few hours’ time feeling quite refreshed. At worst, it’s akin to a bad night’s sleep. The worst of it will be the soreness in the new eye, but that should abate within a few weeks. You’ll find the blurriness improves day to day.”
“I much look forward to that, Doctor, I tell you.” The figure was Baron Walford, dressed in a plain linen shirt but unmistakable. He smacked his lips audibly and reclined back onto the table. “Do your worst, Doctor,” he said. “I look forward to being rid of that dreadful false eye once and for all.”
The doctor’s expression was invisible behind his glass. He brought the ethereum-soaked handkerchief down on the baron’s face, and then he turned to the veiled figure in the chair.
“If you will, sir,” the doctor said to the man in the tall hat.
The man whipped the black veil off the figure in the wheelchair and revealed a boy, a boy with blond hair so dirty it looked almost brown, with his hands bound in his lap and a rag tied around his face to prevent him from screaming. The boy wriggled against his constraints, whipping his body back and forth to try to free himself. Even from her distance, Hazel could make out the raw panic in his face, which was turning beet red.
“Now, now,” the doctor cooed, and he rewet his handkerchief with the ethereum before pressing it into the hostage’s face. The boy struggled against his captors, and then went limp.
“There we are,” the doctor said. “Let’s get him onto the table. If you will, sir?”
The man in the tall hat helped the doctor lift the boy out of the chair and toward the long table in the center of the stage, directly beside where Baron Walford was lying peacefully as if he were merely asleep. The boy’s body dragged lifeless as a rag doll’s.
“A nightmare to find the right eye color,” the man in the tall hat said, his voice rough as gravel. “Got me a dozen lads before I landed one with the right shade. ‘Mahogany,’ innit? Tell me them peepers ain’t mahogany.”
“Yes, yes,” the doctor said. “I can imagine the trouble. But for what this fine gentleman on the table is paying, I think it serves us to give him exactly what he wants.”
The man in the tall hat cleared his throat. “How much is he paying then? This sort of thing?”
“Now, now, Jones, you know I find it uncouth to talk about money. But I assure you, enough that he should be able to request his new eye will match his old.” The doctor adjusted the lens of his magnifier and selected a scalpel from the table. “The procedure itself is fairly simple, especially because the client didn’t have an eye to begin with. The socket has already been primed. Now all we need—”
He lowered the scalpel with a repulsive squelch onto the face of the boy, who was unconscious but still bound at the wrists. The boy didn’t stir as the doctor’s knife dug below his brow bone and carved a thick gash down his nose. “Out we pop,” the doctor said, and took the boy’s left eye out from its socket. “Jones, please fetch mungroot powder, silver dust, and the poultice I keep in the black jar from the cabinet, if you will.”
The man in the tall hat was staring at the open gash in the young boy’s face and smiling a terrible, wolfish smile. He nodded and obeyed, bringing the three ingredients the doctor had requested back to the table.
“It’s magic is what it is, Doc,” the man in the tall hat murmured as the doctor gingerly dabbed a drop of the poultice into the baron’s empty eye socket and followed it with the boy’s eyeball.
“Not magic at all, Jones,” the doctor said with more than a little impatience, continuing to dress the eye socket with the powders. “Nothing more than science. And, of course, an understanding of the human body perfected over decades of practice.” He chuckled a little, his focus still on the operation before him.
Hazel was frozen with terror. Her voice was trapped in her throat; her feet were rooted to the floor, heavy as if they were made of molten steel. In her mind she thought of the things she should be doing, the actions she should be taking: interrupting with a shout, knocking the knife from the doctor’s hands or, at the very least, running away to get help, to get the police constable again, drag him down the passageway in the alley and force him to see what was happening. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt the faint tug of the examination. It had probably already started, but maybe if she ran, she would be able to make it. But her body would not obey her mind. The terror inside her had become a living thing, a monster that turned her veins into frozen ice and her muscles to water. She could do nothing but continue to watch as the doctor completed his terrible operation, securing the boy’s mahogany eye into Baron Walford’s swollen, ruddy face.