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

by Dana Schwartz

What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand? And didn’t that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?

Hazel found herself taking the carriage into Edinburgh once or even twice a week to join the Almonts for tea or supper, to sit in the morning room and read Lord Almont’s books, to accompany Bernard to whatever social events seemed to be unavoidable.

When she married Bernard and eventually became the new Lady Almont, 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.

“You’ll be quite useful when we’re married, knowing how to mend scratches and treat fevers!” “You’ve always known I want to be a surgeon,” Hazel said. “We’ve talked about it for ages. You’ve always supported me in that.” “Well, yes,” Bernard said to his shoes. “When we were children.”

She was staring at him, with narrow brown eyes so dark they almost looked black. She was pretty, in the way that all wealthy girls are, with their faces clean and hair combed. Her hair was light, reddish and thick and wavy beneath her hat. Her nose was long and straight, her lips curled up on one side.

A thimble-sized crimson bloom on her ivory hands.

“Obviously not where any civilized people are, but up in Edinburgh, where the buildings are on top of one another and the poor are half dead anyway—all the bad air in Edinburgh, honestly, the sooner we get to London, the better. Especially with Percy’s delicate constitution.”

She just followed the main road toward the shimmering black smoke, visible for miles—Auld Reekie, the beating heart of science and literature in Scotland.

The Roman fever had taken George less than a season later. Hazel had been sick, too, clutching her blankets and soaking her bedding with her sweat and the blood from the sores on her back.

His gray eyes seemed to glow in the dark, and though the air was stuffy, Hazel suddenly became cold. “Here, come on.”

Resurrection men were supposed to disappear in sunlight, the vampires who fed the medical students of the city. The delivery took longer than he’d thought it would—Straine had refused to pay the last guinea because the body was a week old. It was, but that wasn’t Jack’s fault.

Hazel was dizzy with the heat and the smell of hot, coppery blood and visions of what she had just seen. A surgery! With her own two eyes! Flesh, mottled and damaged, cut away to reveal the clean bright red beneath, those veins and arteries tied with the deft skill of a master with an embroidery needle.

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 to want them.

Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.

“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?”

Lady Sinnett cut her off with a sad, rueful chuckle. “Nowhere to live. At the mercy of your relatives. At the mercy of your little brother and whomever he deigns to marry. Begging your sister-in-law for scraps of human decency, praying that she’s kind.”

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.

Life at Le Grand Leon was like living inside a music box. The gilt-edged ceiling was painted in four sections meant to represent the four seasons, each with its own collection of potato-shaped cherubs with cheeks the color of roses and skin the color of ivory. And like a music box, there was the dancer, center stage, Isabella Turner. Jack could imagine her like one of those porcelain ballerinas he saw in the window of the antique shop on Holyrood Street, a ballerina balancing on one foot, the other extended out behind her, her arm lifted, her entire body taut like a pulled bowstring.

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.

But she kept spinning, until Jack slammed the box closed.

Isabella had been a fantasy, she always had been.

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

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

Educating her in anatomy would be like teaching a pig to read before the slaughter.

Being a woman had closed many doors to Hazel Sinnett, but it had also revealed to her a valuable tool in her arsenal: women were almost entirely overlooked as people, which gave her the power of invisibility. People saw women, they saw the dresses women wore on public walks through the park, and the gloved hands they rested on their suitors’ elbows at the theater, but women were never threats. They were never challenges worthy of meaningful consideration.

“It’s no matter. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person, Miss Sinnett.” “So, hold on a second. You—?” Hazel began, but then thought better of it. She blinked a few times. “So you’re not upset with me?” Dr. Beecham smiled sympathetically. “No, I confess I am not upset with you. A little, well, disappointed in my own skills of observation, but … no, no. Not upset. Interested, really.”

When you’ve lived as long as I have, my dear, you take novelty wherever you can find it, and you are nothing if not novel.”

To test my abilities. And if I pass, I receive my qualifications, and you permit women to enroll in your lecture from here on out. Yours and Straine’s.”

“Morte magis metuenda senectus. Do you know Latin, Miss Sinnett?” “Only some, I’m sorry to say. Is it—er—something like, ‘We fear old age—’?” “‘Old age should rather be feared than death.’”

“No, no, no, no. Never a grave robber. Very careful about that. You see, if you don’t take anything but the body from the grave, they can’t get you on grave robbing.” “So you’re a body snatcher, then.”

The lovely Miss Sinnett and I are engaged. Or at least, we are but a moment away. Hazel, my dear, will you marry me?”

one of the first lessons he’d learned in the narrow closes and tight hidey-holes of the underbelly of Edinburgh was never to rely on someone with less to lose than you did.

how precariously they balanced on the precipice between promise and ruin.

he didn’t have any good reason to trust Hazel Sinnett, but he did so anyway.

She was unlike any girl he had ever met—the sound of her syllables narrower and more refined than those of Jeanette or even Isabella. The girls at the theater wore thick oil makeup; there was something startling about standing close to Hazel, being able to see her freckles and

“Dead bodies are never going to bite you. They’re never going to do anything to you. It’s living things that hurt you.”

Standing so close to Hazel in a grave again, Jack felt the magnetic charge of her skin, could smell the salt of her sweat. He wanted to kiss her, but before he could figure out how, the crack of metal on wood came.

Jack wrapped his arms around Hazel and kissed her as if she were his only source of oxygen. His hands were in her hair, running up her neck, along her jawline. His fingertips traced the velvet lobes of her perfect ears. 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.

Hazel set aside her book and looked back at Bernard’s eager, expectant face. He was asking her a question to which she already knew the answer, had known it her entire life. There was only ever one life for her if she wanted to survive. “Yes, Bernard,” she said softly. “I will marry you.”

“Dear Lord in heaven,” he whispered. “You’re so beautiful, Hazel Sinnett.”

“Someone should tell you that you’re beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone

“Hazel Sinnett, you are the most miraculous creature I have ever come across, and I am going to be thinking about how beautiful you are until the day I die.”

trust you, Dr. Sinnett.” It was almost enough to make her smile.

continuing to dress the eye socket with the powders. “Nothing more than science. And, of course, an understanding of the human body perfected over decades of practice.”

Poverty is the real murderer, 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.”

You’re going to become a brilliant physician. You’re going to help so many people and change so many lives. You’re going to light the world on fire,

Hazel leaned forward to kiss Jack again. “I will spend my entire life loving you, Jack Currer,

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