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

by Dana Schwartz

That was the illness’s true cruelty: it often claimed those who had not yet had a chance to live.

“Now we have to undress him, make sure we don’t bring any of his clothes with us. We’re not thieves, after all.” They stood over the body when their task was complete, the darkness protecting the dead stranger’s modesty. “This is strange,” Hazel said. “It feels like we’re at a funeral.”

I’ve dealt with my fair share of corpses, and I can tell you there’s no reason anyone would want to hold on to that. We’re rotting bags of meat is all, and we start going bad pretty quick. Ghosts can go anywhere, right? No reason to stick around their bodies being eaten by worms.”

“Folk medicine is often far more effective than the bleeding and cupping procedures they do at the hospitals,” she said. “Your mother must have learned it from somewhere.”

Neither had known it could feel like this, that it was supposed to feel like this: effortless. It was as if the other’s lips were the only place they’d ever belonged, and fate itself had brought them to this very moment, terrified and aching in a half-dug grave, just so the two of them could come together.

they think I’m with child, I won’t be allowed to work no more. Mrs. Poffroy will have me out on the street before I can blink. I know the stories. I know what happens to girls once their reputations is ruined.”

“Someone should tell you that you’re beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Wednesdays. And at teatime. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and the evening before Christmas Eve, and on Easter. He should tell you on Guy Fawkes Night and on New Year’s, and on the eighth of August, just because.”

When you’ve been poor as long as I

have, greed don’t quite seem so bad of a sin, I think.

I supposed to get honest work now? Couldn’t get honest work when I had two arms.”

The constable interrupted her with a snort. He shook his head. “Your brain is too idle, miss. It runs away with you.”

I hope your father returns before his daughter becomes a public disruption instead of just a fool.”

And what difference did it really make? They all lived in big houses and did nothing for a living but order servants about and choose which embroidered handkerchief to keep in their pocket that day.

She had always been safe. Poverty made Jack vulnerable, but it also made him reckless.

“Yes, darling,” he said through gritted teeth. “No matter what people call it. When it’s more than halfway, it’s not the same ship.” “Some women,” Lord Almont said to his son, “have yet to learn that we enjoy looking at them more than listening to them.”

Hazel gave silent thanks for all the etiquette lessons her mother had insisted upon to teach her quiet, ladylike steps, and she crept slow as a sigh through the shadows as far as she dared.

I always find my hands steadier when I’m performing for someone. How dull to make art in an empty room, a symphony gone unheard. And you’re one of the few who I believe may actually appreciate the gravity of what I do here. The rest of them”—he gestured to the sleeping baron, whose eye was now padded with cotton—“are perfectly content just to get what they want. They pay their fee, and the deed is done. No curiosity.

No

interest in science beyond their own silly little purposes. It’s tragic, in its own way, how small their lives are. How little they care ...

They lose their limbs and lives in meaningless, terrible ways every single day. This thief here could have died of hunger or consumption, or in a brawl or a thousand other ways. A knife in a pub fight could have taken his eye tomorrow, and no one would care. I simply give order to the chaos. I give meaning to their lives.”

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?”

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?”

Miss Sinnett, I am about to teach you a very important lesson. I have lived a very long life—yes, longer than you might imagine—and attachments, like whatever silly little bond you might have with this boy lying on the table, serve no purpose. Pleasure is fleeting. Science, the information you can gather, the things you can learn—these are what last. These are what make a legacy.

He kissed Hazel dryly on the cheek. “Until then, my love.” Hazel didn’t take her eyes off Jack. If she had, she might have seen the thing that raged like smoking coals behind Bernard’s eyes.

how dare you try to blacken the name of one of your social betters.”

The wind, and the world, had numbed her, and nothing hurt her anymore.

“Solved the puzzle of immortality,” Beecham said. “The ultimate aim of any physician, I imagine. Turns out the rest of them just weren’t as clever as I am.”

“A tonic,” he said. “My tonic. If you’re asking how I came to discover it, I suppose the only answer is fear. Fear of death. Fear of being forgotten.

Let’s just say the answer is ‘sorcery.’ Isn’t all science magic to those who don’t understand it? The burden of knowledge is that it turns the world mechanical. I am immortal in a world in which all the miracles have been explained away.”

“You love him,” he said simply. It was not a question, merely an observation. “Then I’ve done you the greatest service of all, Miss Sinnett. Love is nothing but the prolonged agony of waiting for it to end. The fear of losing the ones we love makes us do selfish and foolish and cruel things. The only freedom is freedom from love, and once your love is gone, it can be perfect, crystallized in your memory forever.”

“Every one of us deserves to die,” Dr. Beecham said. “It is our only birthright.”

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.”

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.”

“I suppose what you said was correct. Losing the one you love is the only freedom.

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.

Hazel had expected tears upon seeing him again, but there were none. They had all left her over the past few days. She was drained of joy and sorrow alike, fully numb and fully hollow.

“My heart is yours, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said. “Forever. Beating or still.” “Beating or still,” she said.