“My heart is yours, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said. “Forever. Beating or still.”
“Beating or still,” she said.
* * *
THEY HANGED JACK CURRER IN THE GRASS- market the next morning at ten o’clock. They said there had never been a bigger crowd in Edinburgh for a public hanging, but Hazel didn’t attend. They said his body was bought and taken to the university teaching hospital.
But they didn’t say if it stayed there.
38
WHEN SPRING CAME AND THE FROST melted, and the stream below Hawthornden filled its banks, Iona and Charles were married in the garden. The bride wore a pink dress that Hazel had ordered from a seamstress in the New Town, and her braid was woven with small white flowers and greenery.
“Will you be all right?” Iona asked Hazel after the ceremony and the dancing, while Charles waited by the side of the carriage. The pair were off to Inverness for their honeymoon, and while they would be returning to Hawthornden in a month’s time, they would no longer be living in the castle with Hazel. Charles and Iona would live in a small cottage together in the village, as husband and wife. With her father on Saint Helena, and her mother and Percy choosing to remain in London, Hazel would be living alone in Hawthornden Castle for the first time in her life.
Well, not alone. For the entire winter, the first floor of Hawthornden had been serving as a hospital, where Hazel treated patients suffering from Roman fever and worse. Use of wortflower root meant that not a single one of her patients had died, and Hazel was hard at work on an inoculation she believed could prevent the transference of the disease entirely. Dr. Beecham surely would have discovered it himself had the growing pile of bodies from the Roman fever and the fear it elicited not made such a convenient cover for the mutilations and murders he performed.
“I will be more than all right,” Hazel said. In truth, she had been looking forward to it, the mornings of solitary walks, and time alone with her books, evenings curled up with a book on the windowsill while the rain fell on the other side of the glass.
“And you’re certain you don’t mind if Charles and I take the carriage?”
“Of course not, Iona. I have Miss Rosalind if I need to go anywhere. Perhaps I should get another horse for the stables,” Hazel said. “In case she gets lonely.”
The week after Jack’s execution, Betelgeuse had gone missing. It seemed the horse was stolen in the night. Hazel hadn’t heard anything from the stables, though—it was almost as if Betelgeuse had wandered away himself.
Iona hugged Hazel. “Please take care of yourself.”
“Take care of yourself! You’re a married woman now. That means no more foolishness,” Hazel said, straightening Iona’s braid.
Iona beamed. “Me, a married lady! Can ye believe it?”
“Of course I can,” said Hazel. “You deserve everything you want in this world—and more.”
Iona turned to gaze proudly at Charles, who was slapping dirt from his trousers as he leaned against the carriage door, and then she looked back at Hazel. “And you, miss. You deserve the things you want in this world.”
Hazel found that the lump in her throat made it hard for her to speak. All she could do was hug Iona close one last time and watch as the carriage bounced up and away through the garden path and down the main drive.
Jack came to her in her dreams sometimes, his eyes warm and wanting. For the first few months, her pillows would be wet with tears in the morning, but even when the tears stopped, the ache was still there in her heart, heavy as a stone, the sinking feeling that came in the moment before she opened her eyes and had to remember that she lived in a world without him. She sometimes imagined him sailing for France, or the Americas, standing proud on the rigging of a ship somewhere while the sea crashed around him, the boy who would remain young and beautiful forever, the boy she had taught how to ride and whom she’d kissed in a grave. He sometimes spoke to her in her dreams, leaning in close to tell her quiet, tender things she could never recall upon waking. Hazel tried to stay there for as long as she could, in the dim half sleep where the shadows made themselves into Jack’s proud profile, the contours of his face. She could see it: the slope of his cheekbones, his long, dark eyelashes, his stern brow—the hundred small places she had touched her lips to his skin.
But then the pale yellow light of morning would press its way into the corners of Hazel’s bedroom, and Hazel would rise to begin her day of work, healing the living.
epilogue
THE LETTER ARRIVED AT HAWTHORNDEN Castle with burnt and yellowed edges, bent in odd places. It looked as though it had traveled around the world twice and spent most of its Christmas holidays folded in a child’s sticky pocket. It bore a stamp from New York City.