One morning, Hazel woke to the sound of their mother shrieking in heaving sobs. But then, quick as the sickness came, it took him. He had been so young, so strong, so healthy that even when he first got sick, Hazel remembered wondering whether he’d be well enough for ninepins on the lawn that very weekend or whether she’d have to wait another week for him to get his energy back. George had died a few years ago, when the Roman fever swept through the city, one of thousands who perished before they even understood what the sickness was. George, the golden child, athletic and strong, smarter than Hazel and genuinely kind Hazel, who always found a new way for her mother to criticize her and Percy, the spoiled princeling who had basically all but become their mother’s poodle.īut there weren’t three of them. There had been three of them: George, Hazel, and little Percy. Hazel realized what she had said even before the words had fully left her mouth. “Eight siblings! Your poor mother,” Hazel said. She heard there was a lady doctor who didn’t take much in terms of payment.” “There are eight of us but I’m the oldest. “My brothers and sisters,” he said almost apologetically. Martin removed the leather strip from his mouth. The sound of children laughing and stomping upstairs disrupted the tense, nervous silence. Martin nodded with a gesture so small it might have been a shiver. “And I’m going to do everything I can to make this better.” Hazel imagined that he had been working the docks at Leith since he was ten. The patient was named Martin Potter, and he might have been around her age-sixteen or seventeen maybe-but his face was already browned and set like an adult’s. That last part was going to hurt the most. Hazel prepared her equipment: a scalpel to cut open the arm and let out the worst of the infection, the needle and thread she would use to sew his arm back up, and then the strips of cloth and pieces of wood she would fashion into something to keep his arm in place once she re-broke and reset it. When Hazel arrived at their dingy flat near Mary King’s Close first thing in the morning, she had found the boy’s arm swollen and hot, the skin bruised yellow and green, and tight as a sausage casing. A young girl had come to Hazel’s door the night before and begged her to come, describing the way her older brother’s arm had broken weeks before, while he was working at the shipyard, and the way it had healed wrong: twisted and impossible to move. The boy bit down harder on the piece of leather she had brought for that very purpose and nodded. I am sorry about that.” Hazel Sinnett didn’t feel as though there was any use in lying.
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