clutched her stomach, looking pale. I watched her curiously. I didn’t feel the need to turn away like normal ladies should. Mother had drilled into me the standards of proper young ladies, but my impulses didn’t always obey. So I had learned to hide them instead.
I looked back at the rabbit. Creeping vines of worry wound around my ankles and up my legs.
‘Something’s wrong.’
The student performing the surgery glanced up, irritated, before selecting another scalpel and returning to work.
‘Sh,’ Adam breathed in my ear. My chest tightened as my eyes darted over the rabbit. There. The rabbit’s rear foot jerked. And there. Its chest rose and fell in a quick breath. I clasped Lucy’s hand, feeling the blood rushing to the base of my skull.
My brain processed the movements disjointedly, with an odd feeling like I had seen all this before. I gasped. ‘It’s alive.’
The rabbit’s glassy eye blinked. My heart faltered. I turned to Adam, bewildered, and then back to the table, where the boys continued to operate. They ignored me, as they ignored the rabbit’s movements. Something white and hot filled my head and I gripped the edge of the table, jolting it. ‘It’s not dead!’
The surgeon turned to Adam in annoyance. ‘You’d better keep them quiet.’
‘It isn’t supposed to be alive,’ Lucy stammered, her face pale. The handkerchief slipped from her hand, falling to the floor slowly, dreamlike. ‘Why is it alive?’
‘Vivisection.’ The word came out of me like a vile thing trying to escape. ‘Dissection of living creatures.’ I took a step back, wanting nothing to do with it. Dissection was one thing. What they were doing on that table was only cruel.
‘It’s just a rabbit,’ Adam hissed. Lucy began to sway. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the operation. Had they even bothered to anesthetize it?
‘It’s against the law,’ I muttered. My pulse matched the thumps of the frightened rabbit’s still-beating heart. I looked at the placement of the organs on the table. At the equipment carefully laid out. It was all familiar to me.
Too familiar.
‘Vivisection is prohibited by the university,’ I said, louder.
‘So is having women in the operating theater,’ the surgeon said, meeting my eyes. ‘But you’re here, aren’t you?’
‘Bunch of Judys,’ a dark-haired boy said with a sneer. The others laughed, and he set down a curled paper covered with diagrams. I caught sight of the rough ink outline of a rabbit, splayed apart, incision cuts marked with dotted lines. This, too, was familiar. I snatched the paper. The boy protested but I turned my back on him. My ears roared with a warm crackling. The whole room suddenly felt distant, as though I was watching myself react. I knew this diagram. The tight handwriting. The black, dotted incision lines. From somewhere deep within, I recognized it.
Behind me, the surgeon remarked to another boy in a whisper, ‘Intestines of a flesh-toned color. Pulsing slightly, likely from an unfinished digestion. Yes – there, I see the contents moving.’
With shaking fingers I unfolded the paper’s dog-eared right corner. Initials were scrawled on the diagram: H.M. Blood rushed in my ears, drowning out the sound of the boys and the rabbit and the clicking electric light. H.M. – Henri Moreau.
My father.
Through his old diagram, these boys had resurrected my father’s ghost in the very theater where he used to teach. I was flooded with a shivering uneasiness. As a child I’d worshipped my father, and now I hated him for abandoning us. Mother had fervently denied the rumors were true, but I wondered if she just couldn’t bear to have married a monster.
Suddenly the rabbit jolted and let out a scream so unnatural that I instinctively made the sign of the cross.
‘Good lord,’ Adam said, watching with wide eyes. ‘Jones, you cad, it’s waking up!’
Jones rushed to the table, which was lined with steel blades and needles the length of my forearm. ‘I gave it the proper dose,’ he stuttered, searching through the glass vials.
The rabbit’s screams pierced my skull. I slammed my hands against the table, the paper falling to the side. ‘End this,’ I cried. ‘It’s in pain!’
Lucy sobbed. The surgeon didn’t move. Frustrated, I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Do something! Put it out of its misery.’
Still, none of the boys moved. As medical students, they should have been trained for any situation. But they were frozen. So I acted instead.
On the table beside me was the set of operating instruments. I wrapped my hand around the handle of the ax, normally used for separating the sternum of cadavers. I took a deep breath, focusing on the rabbit’s neck. In a movement I knew had to be fast and hard, I brought down the ax.
The rabbit’s screaming stopped.
The awful tension in my chest dripped out onto the wet floor. I stared at the ax, distantly, my brain not yet connecting it with the blood on my hands. The ax fell from my grasp, crashing to the floor. Everyone flinched.
Everyone but me.
Lucy grabbed my shoulder. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said, her voice strained. I swallowed. The diagram lay on the table, a cold reminder of my father’s hand in all this. I snatched it and whirled on the dark-haired boy.
‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded.
He only gaped.
I shook him, but the surgeon interrupted. ‘Billingsgate. The Blue Boar Inn.’ His eyes flashed to the ax on the floor. ‘There’s a doctor there.’
Lucy’s hand tightened in mine. I stared at the ax. Someone bent down to pick it up, hesitantly. Adam. Our eyes met and I saw his horror at what I’d done, and more – disgust. Lucy was wrong. He wouldn’t want to marry me. I was cold, strange, and monstrous to those boys, just like my father. No one could love a monster.
‘Come on.’ She tugged me through the hallways to the street outside. It was cold, but my numb skin barely felt it. A few people passed us, bundled up, too concerned about the weather to notice the blood on our clothes. Lucy leaned against a brick wall and pressed a hand over her chest. ‘My God, you cut its head off!’
Blood was on my hands, on the tattered lace of my sleeves, even dotting the diamond ring my mother had left me. I stared at the paper in my fist. The Blue Boar Inn. The Blue Boar Inn. I couldn’t let myself forget that name.
Lucy braced her hands on my shoulders, shaking me. ‘Juliet, say something!’
‘They shouldn’t have done that,’ I said, feeling feverish in the cold night air. The paper was damp from my sweating palms. ‘I had … I had to stop it.’
I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder tighter. ‘Of course you did. Our cook kills a brace of hares for dinner all the time. That’s all you did – killed a rabbit that was already going to die.’ But her voice was shaking. What I had done was unnatural, and we both knew it.
A cold breeze blew off the
