“You’re a murderer,” Hazel spat.
“Perhaps,” Dr. Beecham said lightly. “But I also bring life. I save lives with the bodies I kill. Poverty is the real murderer, Miss Sinnett. I didn’t create the poor who suffer living twenty to a room in squalor, working twenty hours a day just for a scrap of meat. Is that a life to begin with?”
Hazel looked at the boy with the blond hair and the river of blood pouring from the place where his eye once was. His hair was matted with blood, but his chest still rose and fell faintly with thin breaths.
“He could die! That boy there is dying and you would have killed him because the baron wanted a new eye.”
Dr. Beecham chuckled slightly. “Yes, I suppose this instance does seem a bit vain, doesn’t it? The wealthy want the best. It started with new teeth—most if not all surgeons are capable of creating false teeth from someone else’s mouth. But I’m the only one capable of doing more. And most everyone wants more. And they’re willing to pay. Not every transposition I do is for vanity, my dear. This year alone I’ve done—let me see now—two livers, a uterus, and a lung. All to extend the lives of those who spend their time on art and literature and music and science. Taken from those condemned to suffer lives of misery and toil. Now, tell me, is that wrong?”
Hazel could not tear her eyes away from the boy bleeding on the table with shallow breaths. “Please!” she shouted. “Please, he’s dying.”
A shadow of disappointment crossed Dr. Beecham’s face, but he carefully replaced it with his pleasant mask. He clicked his tongue. “I so would have wished you could grasp the larger implications here, Miss Sinnett. Really.” Anger crept into his voice. “Don’t you see what I’ve done? Don’t you appreciate it?” He stuck one gloved finger into the bloody socket of the boy on the table, pressed, and twisted. “No, I don’t think you do. He’s probably going to live, I would say. If the shock were going to kill him, it would have done so already. I think I did him a favor, actually. He was begging on the street when my associate found him, and I hear boys with physical deformities evoke far more sympathy in passersby. He would probably thank me if he could. Humanity is far larger than the sum of its pathetic individuals, and the chosen few are capable of such miraculous achievements. Do you believe God mourns when insects are crushed beneath stones while man is building towers, and cathedrals, and universities?”
Hazel shook her head. “You’re not God,” she snapped.
Beecham laughed. “If only you knew, Miss Sinnett. The things I have become capable of in my life. The things I have done to the human body. The things I can do! But, no—I get ahead of myself.”
“What would your grandfather think? Dr. Beecham, in his treatise, the things he writes about protecting mankind, and serving as a—a vessel for the betterment of humanity—”
“My grandfather? What would he—？ Oh! Oh, that’s rich, that’s rich indeed.” Beecham laughed again, throatily. He wiped a tear from his eyes. “Those words were written by a fool. A young fool who had yet to live. I promise you, Miss Sinnett, I am far wiser than my grandfather who wrote those words so long ago.”
Hazel’s eyebrows knitted together, but before she could say anything, a knock on the door behind Beecham interrupted them.
“Another delivery,” said a muffled voice from the other side.
“Enter,” Beecham said.
Two men carried a stretcher between them, with a body hidden beneath a sheet. The men were odd looking, one short and bald, the other half hidden behind a wide walrus mustache. They looked familiar, but Hazel couldn’t quite place them.
“Found this one digging for bodies in Greyfriars last night,” said the one with a mustache, revealing a row of grotesquely yellow teeth as he spoke. “All alone. Think we scared ’im ’alf to death.”
Hazel’s stomach knotted. She took a step forward, but the tall man behind her wrapped his beefy arm around her neck, holding her in place. “Oh no you don’t, missy,” he growled in her ear.
Dr. Beecham sniffed. “Swap out the baron on the stretcher and put the body on the table. The baron can convalesce in the recovery room.” The two men carrying the stretcher nodded and set to work. They deposited the sheet-wrapped body on the table next to the bleeding boy. Baron Walford was hoisted onto the stretcher and removed from the operating theater.
“A corpse?” Hazel asked quietly.