Anatomy: A Love Story

Hazel follows the secret passage to the surgical theater, where she sees Baron Walford, the man in the tall hat, the figure in the wheelchair, and a doctor wearing unusual headgear that makes him look like “a distorted cyclops with a round glass eye set in brass” (291). The man in the top hat removes the veil, revealing a terrified blond boy. The doctor sedates both the boy and the baron with ethereum, then transplants the boy’s eye into the baron’s empty eye socket. The doctor pours a drop from a vial of golden liquid into the transplanted eye. Hazel considers interrupting the dreadful operation, running for help, or even hurrying to the exam, but fear freezes her in place. The doctor tells his associate in the top hat, Jones, to dispose of the boy if he bleeds to death and claim he died of the Roman fever. The doctor removes his headgear, revealing that he is Beecham. When Jones compliments his work, Beecham replies, “Well, I did try [....] After all, we had an audience today” (295).

Jones seizes Hazel and brings her to Beecham. Because she isn’t sitting for the exam, the doctor takes this to mean that she has forfeited their wager. Still, he is ecstatic at Hazel’s presence, believing her to be one of the few people who can appreciate his groundbreaking scientific advancements. He has successfully transplanted a uterus and believes that he will soon be able to transplant a heart. Beecham grows angry when she accuses him of murdering the poor and is more concerned with the dying boy than his achievements. Hazel tries to appeal to Beecham’s humanity by reminding him of the ideals in Dr. Beecham’s Treatise, but he retorts that the treatise was written by a “young fool who had yet to live” (300).

Two of Beecham’s accomplices carry Jack into the surgical theater. At the sight of Jack, Hazel struggles to free herself from Jones, prompting Beecham to realize that she is emotionally attached to the resurrection man. The doctor tells her that attachments bring only pain and that “strength comes in the ability to overcome those human impulses” (302). He intends to drive the lesson home by transplanting Jack’s heart into the now dead blond boy. He makes an incision in Jack’s chest, but Jack wrests the ethereum from Beecham and uses it to render the doctor unconscious. Hazel stabs Jones with a quill and then wheels Jack outside. She spots Bernard in the street, and he helps her transport the wounded resurrection man to Almont House. The cut is deep but missed everything vital, and Hazel sews it shut. Jeanette, who works as a maid for the Almonts, is shocked to see her friend injured, but she takes comfort in knowing that he’s under Hazel’s care. Unbeknownst to Hazel, Bernard sees her tenderly touching Jack’s face. Hiding his smoldering anger, he listens to her account of Dr. Beecham’s crimes and agrees to contact the police.

Two days later, Hazel brings Jack to Hawthornden. A week later, he’s able to walk, and he goes to Le Grand Leon to retrieve his things. He moves as if to kiss Hazel goodbye before reconsidering. At the theater, the constable who came to Hawthornden, the magistrate, and two guards arrest Jack. They accuse him of murdering several people, including Penelope Harkness, whose body Davey and Munro unearthed in the Prologue. Bernard is the one who told the officers that Jack is a killer. When Jack asks them to contact Hazel to learn the truth, the constable strikes him and tells him not to “blacken the name of one of [his] social betters” (314).

The December 22, 1817, edition of the Edinburgh Evening Courant gives details of Jack’s trial. Dr. Beecham and Bernard testify against him, and Dr. Straine is also indicted for illegally purchasing bodies.

On Christmas Day, Hazel walks from Hawthornden to the Anatomists’ Society and confronts the so-called Dr. Beecham III, having realized that he is the only Dr. Beecham and that he pretended to be his own grandson. Dr. Beecham removes his ever-present black gloves, revealing fingers that are “mottled and dead, ten fingers from ten different hands” (319). Beecham sought the key to eternal life because he feared death and believed he was destined for “something greater than the tannery where [his] father worked, where he expected [him] to work” (320). He shows Hazel the golden tonic that he created to attain immortality but declines to share the details of its composition. Beecham recalls losing his wife, Eloise, and his three children and tells Hazel that love is agony.

Beecham says he asked Eloise to drink the tonic, but she refused. He offers the tonic to Hazel, believing that her brilliant mind will allow her to make excellent use of immortality and that women doctors will be accepted in the future. Dr. Beecham expresses his plans to go to America and proposes a toast to her engagement. Hazel no longer cares about retaining her social status or what her family thinks. She has rejected Bernard. She accepts the tonic not for herself but because she hopes it will save Jack from death. Looking like a shadow, Beecham quietly affirms that the tonic will prevent death by a broken neck or strangulation. 

Jack is sentenced to death, and Dr. Straine loses his medical license. Hazel bribes a guard to let her see Jack and explains to him that Beecham found the secret to immortality. She urges him to drink the tonic so they can run away and start a new life together. Jack laughs, and the sound contains “all the joy and hurt and love he’d felt for Hazel in his brief time knowing her” (328). Hazel finds herself laughing and crying in response. Jack doesn’t want to subject Hazel to a life on the run, nor does he want to live forever while she grows old and dies, so he doesn’t know whether he should take the tonic. He promises Hazel that his heart is hers forever, “[b]eating or still” (330). Jack is hanged the next morning, and his body is taken to the university hospital.

In the spring, Charles and Iona are married and leave Hawthornden. Hazel’s family members are still abroad, and she lives in the castle alone except for her patients. The wortflower has kept the patients with the Roman fever alive, and she plans to work on an inoculation soon. After Jack’s execution, Betelgeuse goes missing. Hazel often imagines Jack sailing for the Continent or the Americas, “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” (333). Despite her heartache, Hazel carries on with her work as a healer.

A battered, unsigned letter with a stamp from New York City arrives, promising Hazel, “My beating heart is still yours [...] and I’ll be waiting for you” (335).