“I have found a single drop of the tonic,” Beecham said, “heavily diluted, is enough to ensure that the limbs and organs I transpose acclimate to their new body properly and without infection—I know you were wondering about that.” He rolled the vial in his fingers. “This is the very vial I offered to my wife, Eloise, before she died. I have kept it with me ever since. You know, Miss Sinnett, in a hundred years, the notion of a female surgeon may not seem so absurd. And even less absurd in the hundred after that. You will be far better served in the centuries to come, and by then, you will have learned enough to be more brilliant than anyone can ever hope to be in a single lifetime. Here. Take it.”
Hazel extended her hand on instinct, and then paused. In truth, moments before she had contemplated snatching it and running, but now she hesitated. “You give your life’s work so freely?”
“Not freely, I assure you. You are only the second person to whom I have ever offered this vial, and the first I am certain could make excellent use of it. No matter what you think of me at this moment, Miss Sinnett, I know you will eventually come to understand the vastness of what I have achieved. Bodies littered the bases of the pyramids, my dear. All progress requires human sacrifice. They were the poor and the destitute. The city had already killed them, and I was just using every piece of the animal.”
Hazel’s ears rang and her heart pounded in her chest. She took the vial.
“How long will you stay here?” she asked, running her thumb along the vial’s glass, which seemed to permanently remain cool. “In Edinburgh, I mean. How long before people notice you haven’t grown older?”
Beecham took another sip of his tea. “It’ll be quite soon for me, I’m afraid. I think I’ll be off to America next. It’s a vast country. An easy place for a man to disappear and make himself again. So no tea, then? Or perhaps something stronger! It is Christmas, after all. I think I have some well-aged brandy somewhere around here— Ah yes.” From behind the podium, Beecham pulled an amber bottle. He poured a nip into his tea, and then a few fingers into a clean glass for Hazel. “I insist,” he said. “It’s Christmas.”
“Cheers, then,” Hazel said. She took a sip that burned her tongue and singed her throat all the way down.
Beecham raised his teacup. “To your engagement,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “I understand you were recently betrothed. Even dons hear the society gossip, I’m afraid.”
Hazel shook her head. “It’s funny,” she said. “I suppose what you said was correct. Losing the one you love is the only freedom.”
The morning after Jack was arrested, Hazel woke up with no self-doubt or fear. There was nothing that frightened her about a life without the safety of a title or a castle, about the wrath of her mother or the disappointment of her father. She would live as a witch in a hedge, stitching wounds and delivering newborns, if she had to. She would beg on the streets, work as a maid, sail to the Continent. The change was astonishing—a spark in her brain, a miracle of fluids or electricity, and now her life felt completely different. For the first time in her seventeen years, her life was her own.
She had burned every unopened letter that Bernard had sent by messenger since her refusal. The white lilies he sent she dropped into the stream below Hawthornden.
When Hazel finished her brandy, she stood and thanked Dr. Beecham for the drink. “Good luck in America,” she said, and turned her back to leave.
“I do hope you take it,” Beecham said. “I meant what I said, about the world not being ready for you yet. I would be delighted to see what you could accomplish in the next century. And I would finally have a scientific mind to keep me company.”
Hazel turned. “The only use I have for immortality,” she said, “is to discover if it will protect someone against a hanging.”
Beecham stood in surprise, his mouth open. He blinked a few times quickly, and then sat again. “Yes,” he said quietly. “As a matter of fact, immortality is stronger than a broken neck and strangulation.”
Hazel nodded at the doctor and left, and Beecham was alone in his classroom, the fire illuminating him from behind so he looked less like a man and more like a shadow.
37
THERE WERE NO VISITORS ALLOWED IN THE prison, but Hazel slipped a pound to the guard and he nodded and let her in. “Five minutes,” he said, and then turned his back. The verdict had come back quickly. It had taken only four hours for a bench of lords to declare that Jack Currer was guilty and deserved to hang by the neck until dead. For his part in purchasing the bodies, Dr. Straine lost his medical license and he was expelled from the Anatomists’ Society, although for days, a mob in the streets had been shouting that Straine should be hanged too.