Anatomy: A Love Story (The Anatomy Duology, #1)

by Dana Schwartz

helped to guide the body out of the small hole in the coffin and back toward the surface world, a strange reverse birth for a body past death.

Stealing a body was against the law, but if they actually took any property from the grave, that would make it a felony.

She would breach the world between life and death, using electricity to reanimate flesh. What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand?

the bad memories could close like the covers of a heavy book. She would get a new name and a new home. She would have a new life. She would be a new person, a person whom sadness would be unable to find.

she held her breath and pulled herself against one damp stone wall to make herself invisible. She needn’t have bothered. The men were distracted by their own importance, and not one would have thought to look at anyone who happened to be standing a centimeter below his own eyeline.

She could be the one to cure the Roman fever! She would be the savior of Scotland—how could her mother possibly take issue with her then, when she was famous and celebrated?

The prisoner Napoleon would drop dead with shock at the news of a brilliant female physician, and then her father’s posting would be over and he could come home again.

when the nineteenth century was finally starting, and Hazel had a chance to be in the middle of it!

Slowly, the crowd started to file out, with about a dozen men elbowing one another to get to the stage to try to shake hands with Dr. Beecham, in the hope that some of his genius and importance could be transferred palm to palm.

“I shudder to think what a young lady of your social stature is doing in the Old Town.” His lips pursed and his one visible eye narrowed. “Without a chaperone.”

“A shame,” he said, “that women aren’t permitted in the Anatomists’ Society. I always found the fairer sex to be a—calming influence on the sanguineous urges of men.”

“Indeed,” Hazel replied dryly. Straine’s eye seemed able to penetrate through Hazel’s clothes and skin, down to her bones.

She was suddenly so exhausted she could barely speak. The entire weight of the day seemed to hit her at once, leaving her limbs heavy, as if her blood were molten lead.

carving it like a lithograph in her brain.

It wasn’t until she was a moment from sleep, and the tiniest thread tethered her to consciousness, that she realized with a jolt what the third smell in that violet bottle of ethereum was.

It was a memory locked deep inside her mind, through its curving hallways and maze of rooms, from when Hazel was lying in the very same b...

She had been certain the sickness was going to take her. Dr. Beecham’s magical bottle had smelled like wi...

Percy, the little princeling spoiled rotten, her mother’s pride and joy, kept safe and hidden away like a pearl in an oyster so he would never get sick

Hazel accepted cautiously. It seemed like a trick. If it was, the noose would be tightening soon. Perhaps her mother had noticed that she was gone, and her seeming indifference had just been a con, to lull Hazel into a false sense of security.

“I know I’m still in mourning, but I suppose I can wear the pearls that my mother gave me, and the emerald ring from your father. Bought it when we were engaged, don’t know how he ever afforded it, he was just a lieutenant at the time. And there I was, daughter of a viscount, and so easily captured by thoughts of romance and”—she gave a short, rueful laugh—“love.

“I think this might be the most you’ve spoken to me since”—she knew enough not to say George’s name—“since Father left.” Lady Sinnett scoffed. “Oh, honestly, Hazel. Ridiculousness doesn’t suit you.” They sat for another few moments without speaking, with only the clink of forks on china and occasional pops from the fire puncturing the silence.

“Has he asked for your hand yet?” “Well, no, but—” “Do not play games with your future. It permits the possibility of losing.”

Let Bernard see you tonight as a woman, not as a childhood companion.”

“And don’t forget that tea, Lavinia, I shall be scandalized if you continue to avoid me!”

Were they … flirting? It wasn’t possible. Cecilia Hartwick-Ellis had about as much personality as a bowl of rice pudding.

The pair of them—Cecilia and Gibbs—probably couldn’t count to five if they started at four. They certainly hadn’t read that many books between them.

Bernard whispered something into Cecilia’s ear and she laughed again, throwing her head back and making her curls shake. Hazel couldn’t stand to look at it. She wasn’t sure whom she was more embarrassed for.

Last month, they had premiered another story with more or less the same plot—a beautiful young virtuous woman led astray—only that time it had been by a foreign vampire who tempted her with gold and jewels before he consumed her heart.

IT’S THE LESSON YOUNG GIRLS EVERYWHERE were taught their entire lives—don’t be seduced by the men you meet, protect your virtue—until, of course, their entire lives depended on seduction by the right man.

It was an impossible situation, a trick of society as a whole: force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man...

Heaven forbid you turn into someone like Hyacinth Coldwater. Be patient, be silent, be be...

orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell j...

Lady Sinnett swallowed and pressed her tight lips together. “The world is not kind to women, Hazel. Even women like you. Your grandfather was a viscount, yes, but I was a daughter and so that means very little. Your father owns Hawthornden, and when he—when your father dies, Hawthornden will go to Percy. Do you know what happens to unmarried women?”

“Yes, I thought you did. Smart girl, always reading. Not everyone will be so forgiving of your little—quirks—as your cousin is. The books on natural philosophy you steal away from your father’s study. There will be none of that when we go to London. I guarantee Cecilia Hartwick-Ellis doesn’t dirty her dresses with mud—or ink from books.”

“Only because she doesn’t know how to read,” Hazel mumbled to the glass of the carriage window. Lady Sinnett sniffed. “Let your fate be on your own head, then. I have given you all the motherly advice I can.”

The man was being hanged for beating his wife with such viciousness that she died, as had the baby she was carrying in her belly. For weeks, boys in the streets had been selling broadsheets with drawings of the man and details about the crime.

Whatever little those poor souls did in life, they did plenty in death.

Jack tended to disappear into the shadows, but that was by design. Like a nocturnal animal, the best way for Jack to remain safe was to remain unseen.

“Take it, then,” he said. And he left the shop before he could talk himself into changing his mind. It was for Isabella, and it was perfect. It would just mean another night at the kirkyard, and he would steal and sell a thousand bodies if it meant buying Isabella the things that would show her how much he adored her. Let him spend every night in the dirt if it meant getting his mornings with her.

He shoved the music box back under his spare coat. He didn’t want to see it anymore; just looking at it made him burn with humiliation. Isabella had been a fantasy, she always had been. What did he think, he would buy her one stupid music box and she would swoon? He didn’t even know if she liked music boxes! He was a fool. No, worse than a fool. He was a romantic fool.

“Blood will stain your hands. You might find that blood may even stain your very souls.”

The boy’s face went blank with terror. Hazel imagined it was exactly the same face one would make if they just happened to notice a lion running toward them full speed.

Hazel looked at the heart, an alien thing painted in blacks and purples. It was oddly shaped, nonsymmetrical, fatter on one end than the other, coated on one half with a thick beige plaque.

I do not teach because I enjoy culling the sniveling herd of dimwits who want to play doctor, nor because I find it so gratifying to demonstrate, year after year, the most basic principles of anatomy. I teach for money, Mr. Hazleton, and I teach because I think it to be my duty to educate the men who will actually go on to serve as professionals in my city.”

Yes, on the whole, the female brain is smaller, more susceptible to hysterics and emotion, less inclined to reason. But there’s no reason to believe that a specimen might not emerge from the female sex able enough to be taught.”

There was a chance then! Was this an olive branch? Was there a possibility that Straine saw Hazel as that exception? Maybe if she shed her costume and begged forgiveness, she could continue in his class.

“No, I refuse to teach women for a simple reason: I do not waste my time nor energy on dilletantes. There is no place in our world for a woman to practice medicine, Miss Sinnett, sad as that might make you. Another consequence of growing up without the glow of privilege is that one becomes quick to dispel illusion and fantasy. No hospital will hire a female surgeon, nor any university. Even less willing, I imagine, would be a patient to suffer beneath the knife of a woman.

Hazel could feel her eyes sting with tears. She tried to blink them back, but it wasn’t working. Her eyes became hot and red, and a tear caught on her cheek. “Do not attempt to stifle your tears on my account,” Straine said. “Women have such trouble controlling their emotions. You’re dismissed, Miss Sinnett.”

It would be her guests who came with their stories and ideas. Hazel would be seated neatly on a divan, listening. That was the closest she would come to the world of science—the edge of the bubble, permitted to listen and serve tea and smile gamely and offer her thoughts only if they were disguised as harmless witticisms. Her path was finite and certain. Educating her in anatomy would be like teaching a pig to read before the slaughter.

Her ears rang with an echoing sound of laughter that she realized with a shock was her own.