1
THE FROG WAS DEAD, THERE WAS no doubt about that. It had been dead already when Hazel Sinnett found it. She was taking her daily stroll after breakfast, and the frog had just been there, lying on the garden path, on its back as though it had been trying to sunbathe.
Hazel couldn’t believe her luck. A frog, just lying there. An offering. A sign from the heavens. The sky was heavy with gray clouds threatening a rain that hadn’t arrived yet. In other words: the weather was perfect. But the conditions wouldn’t last long. As soon as the rain started to fall, her experiment would be ruined.
From behind the azalea bushes, Hazel looked around to see if anyone was watching her (her mother wasn’t looking out her bedroom window on the second floor, was she?) before she knelt down and casually wrapped the frog in her handkerchief to tuck into the waistband of her petticoat.
The clouds were approaching. Time was limited, and so Hazel cut her walk short and turned around to head swiftly back to Hawthornden Castle. She would go in the back way, so no one would bother her and she would be able slip up to her bedroom immediately.
The kitchen was hot when Hazel entered in a rush, with great clouds of steam burping from the iron pot on the fire and the thick smell of onions clinging to every surface. An abandoned onion lay half chopped on a board. The onion, the board, and a dropped knife nearby on the floor were splattered with blood. Hazel’s eyes followed the trail of red to see Cook sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen by the fire, cradling a hand and rocking back and forth, cooing to herself.
“Oh!” Cook cried when she saw Hazel. Her red face was damp with tears and redder than usual. Cook wiped at her eyes and stood, trying to smooth her skirts. “Miss, didn’t expect you down here. Just—resting my aching legs.” Cook attempted to hide her hand behind her apron.
“Oh, Cook. You’re bleeding!” Hazel reached out to coax Cook’s injured hand forth. She gave half a thought to the frog squelching in her petticoat and the looming rainstorm, but only for a moment. She had to focus on the case at hand. “Here, let me.”
Cook winced. The cut was deep, along the meaty palm of the base of her well-callused hand.
Hazel wiped her own hands on her skirts then looked up to give Cook a small, comforting smile. “This isn’t going to be bad at all. You’ll be right as rain before supper. You, there”—Hazel called to a scullery maid—“Susan, is it? Will you fetch me a sewing needle?” The mousy maid nodded and scampered off.
Hazel took the kitchen basin over to Cook and had her wash her injured hand and wipe it clean on a dishrag. As the blood and soot fell away, the deep cut came into clear focus. “Now, that’s not so scary once the blood is washed away,” Hazel said.
Susan returned with the needle. Hazel held it in the fire until it turned black, and then she lifted her own skirt and pulled a long silk thread from her chemise.
Cook gave a small cry. “Your fine things, miss!”
“Oh, pishposh. It’s nothing, Cook, truly. Now, I’m afraid this might sting just a bit. Are you all right?” Cook nodded. Working as quickly as she could, Hazel slid the needle into Cook’s split palm and began to sew up the cut tight with sutures. The color drained from Cook’s face, and she clenched her eyes.
“Almost there—nearly done now—aaaaand there,” Hazel said, tying the silk into a neat knot. She tore the thread with her teeth. She couldn’t help but smile while examining her work: tiny, neat, even stitches that finally put her childhood of mind-numbingly boring embroidery practice to good use. Hazel lifted her skirts again—carefully, so as not to disturb the frog—and tore a thick ribbon of fabric from her chemise before Cook could object or cry out in shock at further damage to it. Hazel wrapped the fabric tightly around the newly stitched hand. “Now, then: remove the bandage tonight and wash the wound, if you would. I’ll be by tomorrow with a poultice for you. And be careful with the knife, Cook.”
Cook’s eyes were still wet, but she smiled up at Hazel. “Thank you, miss.”
Hazel made it up to her bedroom without any other disturbances, and she raced out onto her balcony. The sky was still gray. Rain hadn’t fallen yet. Hazel exhaled and pulled the frog in its handkerchief from her skirts. She unfurled it and let it flop with a wet squelch onto the stone banister.
The parts of Hawthornden that Hazel liked best were the library—with its mottled green wallpaper and leather books and fireplace lit every afternoon—and the balcony off her bedroom, from which she could look into the tree-lined creek below and see only nature for miles. Her bedroom was on the castle’s south facade; she couldn’t see the smoke rising from the heart of Edinburgh, just an hour’s ride to the north, and so here, on the balcony, she could pretend she was alone in the world, an explorer standing at the precipice of the sum of human knowledge, and building up the courage to take a single step forward.
Hawthornden Castle was built on a cliffside, with ivy-covered stone walls that loomed over untamed Scottish woods and a thin stream that ran farther than Hazel had ever been able to follow. Her family had lived there for at least a hundred years on her father’s side. It had Sinnett history in its walls, in the char and grass and moss that clung to the ancient stones.
A handful of kitchen fires throughout the 1700s meant that most of the castle had been rebuilt on top of itself, brick atop stone. The only remnants of the castle’s original structure were the gates, at the front of the drive, and a cold stone dungeon built into the side of the hill, which had never been used in living memory—except as a threat when Mrs. Herberts caught Percy stealing pudding before tea, or when the footman, Charles, had promised to stay locked inside for a whole day on a dare but lasted no more than an hour.
Most of the time, it felt to Hazel as if she lived at Hawthornden by herself. Percy was usually outside playing, or at lessons. Her mother, still dressed in mourning, rarely left her bedroom, gliding along between the walls like a ghost of death in black. Sometimes it was lonely, but usually Hazel felt grateful for the solitude. Especially when she wanted to experiment.
The dead frog was small, and muddy brown. Its thin limbs, which had flopped in her palms like a loose doll when she plucked it from the footpath, were now stiff and unpleasantly tacky. But the frog was dead, and there was a storm in the air—it was perfect. Every piece was in place.
From behind a small rock on the balcony, Hazel pulled out the fireplace poker and the kitchen fork she had squirreled away weeks ago, waiting for this exact situation to present itself. Bernard had been infuriatingly vague about the type of metal the magician-scientist in Switzerland had used (“Was it brass? Just tell me, Bernard, what color was it?” “I told you, I don’t remember!”), and so Hazel just decided to make do with the metal objects that seemed easy enough to pluck from the household without anyone noticing. The fireplace poker was from her father’s study, and even the servants didn’t bother going in that room anymore in the months since her father and his regiment had been posted on Saint Helena.
A distant groan of thunder echoed through the valley below. It was time. She would breach the world between life and death, using electricity to reanimate flesh. 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 delicately set the poker down on one side of the frog and then, with an air of solemn reverence, she slowly lowered the kitchen fork down to the other side.
Nothing happened.
She moved the fork and the poker closer to the frog, and then, impatiently, set them touching the frog’s skin. Was she supposed to—? No, no, Bernard would have mentioned if the convict’s head had been impaled on a spike. When he came back from his grand tour, she had been breathless with questions about the demonstration he mentioned only in passing in his letter from Switzerland, a demonstration held by the son of the great scientist Galvini. Using electricity, the second Galvini had made frog legs dance and the severed head of a convict blink as if it were alive once again.
“It was frightening, really,” Bernard had said, bringing a cup of tea to his lips and beckoning for the servant to bring another ginger biscuit. “But marvelous, though, in its own strange way, don’t you think?”
Hazel did. Though Bernard had refused to talk about it any further (“Why must you be so morbid, Cousin!”), Hazel found she could conjure up the details of the scene in her mind as easily as if she had been there herself—the man in a French-style jacket, standing onstage in a tiny, wood-lined theater, the red velvet curtains behind him heavy with dust. Hazel could see the string of frogs’ legs jerking up and down, dancing like cancan girls, before Galvini whipped the cloth off the main attraction: the head of a man who had been hanged. In Hazel’s imagination, his neck was cut low enough to show the purplish bruises where the rope had cut in.
We men fear death, Hazel could imagine Galvini saying in a thick Italian accent. Death! Gruesome and terrible! Inevitable and senseless! We dance towards her as we might a beautiful woman (Italians loved to talk about beautiful women) and Death waltzes back towards us, beckoning, always beckoning. Once the veil is pierced, we never return. But it is a new century, my friends.
Here, Hazel imagined him holding a metal rod aloft like Hamlet with a skull, then raising his second rod and letting the lightning dance back and forth between them as the audience cooed. And mankind will conquer the laws of nature!
The audience gasped as the stage lights crackled with light, and gray gunpowder smoke popped for dramatic effect, and the convict’s head came alive.
Bernard described it in a letter that Hazel had read so many times she had memorized every line: the way the convict’s head had jerked when the rods were lowered to its temples, how its eyelids had scrolled open. For a moment, it might have been conscious again, blinking at the scene in front of it—the crowd of men and their wives in their best gloves and hats—and actually seeing them. Bernard hadn’t mentioned the head’s mouth opening, but Hazel found herself imagining a black tongue lolling, as if the head were bored of being trotted out for yet another performance, yet another matinee for yet another crowd.
When the performance was finished, Galvini would have bowed to incredulous applause, and then all the gentlemen would return to their châteaus and villas to amuse their hosts with their description of the evening over port wine.
It was like sorcery, Bernard had written. Although I’d never imagine a sorcerer to be wearing such ill-fitting trousers. Bernard had also mentioned in the letter that he purchased a hunting cape for four hundred francs and that he had seen Prince Friedrich von Hohenzollern wearing the same one.
But here she was, electricity heavy in the sky, metal on either side of the frog, and unlike Galvini’s subjects, Hazel’s remained insipidly, maddeningly, unmistakably inert. Hazel glanced behind her. Her bedroom was empty—her maid, Iona, always finished tidying before breakfast was over. Hazel could hear the tinkling notes of the pianoforte trilling from the open window in the music room, where Percy was having a lesson. Mrs. Herberts was preparing lunch to take up to Hazel’s mother, in her bedroom, as usual; she’d eat at her desk opposite a looking glass draped in gauzy black cloth.
Hazel held her breath and lifted the fire poker once more. There was one thing she hadn’t tried yet, but—Hazel was suddenly dizzy, her mind feeling light, as if it were being pulled to the top of her skull by a string. Her fingers shook. Before she let her body stop itself, she plunged the poker through the frog’s back and out through its stomach. The flesh was disconcertingly easy to pierce, the poker slipping through the brown skin easily to emerge wet, glistening in an indeterminate viscus.
“I’m sorry,” Hazel said aloud, and then immediately felt foolish. It was just a frog. It was just a dead frog. If she was going to become a surgeon, she would need to get acclimated to this sort of thing sooner or later. As if to prove her own fortitude to herself, she wriggled the poker through the frog a little farther. “There,” she murmured. “Serves you right.”
“Serves who right?” It was Percy, standing behind her, his eyes sleepy and hair matted, wearing only one stocking. In her excitement, she hadn’t noticed the pianoforte stop.
Though Percy was seven years old, their mother still had him dressed like a boy half that age, in a cotton shirt lined with blue piping and open at the collar. Lady Sinnett doted on him incessantly, as if he were a priceless and incredibly fragile piece of crystal. He was spoiled and selfish, but Hazel couldn’t find it in herself to be annoyed with him, because the truth was, she felt sorry for him. Hazel enjoyed a rare freedom from their mother smothering him with all her attention, while Percy was hardly allowed to leave the house lest he, heaven forbid, scrape his knee on the garden path.
“It’s nothing,” Hazel said, turning and hiding the frog behind her skirts. “Run along now. Shouldn’t you be at your lesson?”
“Master Poglia let me go early for being such a good boy,” he said, grinning and showing off a row of small, sharp teeth. Hazel spotted one missing on the top. Percy rocked back and forth on his feet. “Play with me. Mummy says you have to do whatever I say.”
“Does she now.” The sky was beginning to clear, a sliver of blue visible on the far horizon. If this was going to work, it needed to be soon. It needed to be while electricity was still in the air. “Why don’t you ask Mummy to play with you then?”
“Mummy is bo-ring,” Percy sang, hopping on one foot and then the other. He shook his blond curls from his eyes. “If I go into Mummy’s room, she’ll pinch my cheeks and make me recite my Latin.”
Hazel wondered if their brother George had been like this as a child, if he had been whiny and so demanding of attention, requiring a witness to applaud and kiss him on the cheek for every horse ride and lesson completed. It seemed impossible. Besides, their mother hadn’t been so fearful or suffocating back then.
George had been quiet and introspective. His smiles felt like secrets shared from across the room every time. At the age of seven, Percy already knew how to wield his smiles as weapons. Did Percy even remember George? He had been so young when their brother died.
Percy sighed. “Fine. We can play pirates,” Percy said as if he were making a concession, as if Hazel herself had barged into his room and begged him to play pirates, and only now, in his benevolence, did Percy agree.
Hazel rolled her eyes.
Percy thrust his lower lip out into an exaggerated frown. “If you don’t say yes, I’ll scream and get Mummy and she’ll be cross with you.”
Another cloud shifted. A patch of light crept up the bottom of Hazel’s dress, the warmth of it amplified through her layers of skirts. “Why don’t you go down to the kitchens and ask Cook what she’s making for tea? I bet if you ask now, she’ll make your favorite lemon cakes.”
Percy considered. He frowned at Hazel and whatever she was hiding behind her skirt, but after a moment’s thought, he turned and scampered away, no doubt down the narrow stairs to torment Cook and Mrs. Herberts. Hazel had bet right: there was no competition between playing with her and eating lemon cakes.
There wasn’t much time left, but before she continued, Hazel needed to lock her door. There could be no more intruders. She walked inside and twisted the heavy key in its lock until she heard the satisfying thud. And then she dashed back to the balcony, where a few drops of water had fallen in the few seconds she was gone, dotting the mossy stone almost black. If this was going to happen, it would be now.
She lifted the kitchen fork again and waved it over each of the frog’s limbs like a shaman. Nothing. Perhaps the demonstration Bernard had seen was a trick. Maybe there was never a corpse at all, but a man hiding under the table, his neck poking out through a hole in the wood with theater makeup deadening his skin until it was flat and colorless. What a laugh the actor—the liar—and the Galvini boy had probably had after the show, counting the paper money they took in, getting drunk with their fellow two-bit performers in grease makeup.
—And then the frog moved.
Had it moved? Had it just been a trick of the light? Or a breeze blowing through the valley? Hazel hadn’t felt anything. Her skirts hadn’t rustled. She waved the fork over the dead, impaled frog, again and again, faster and faster, but nothing else happened. And then she realized.
She pulled the giant key from her pocket and gently lowered it toward the frog, and the frog began to dance. The frog, which moments before had dangled lifeless on its pike, now jittered with energy. It still had the will to live, as if it were trying to escape. It was something out of a fairy tale, Hazel thought. Let me off this poker, the frog seemed to say, and I’ll grant you three wishes! Or maybe it was out of a nightmare, like the stories in those penny-fiction pamphlets Percy’s tutor sometimes slipped her with a wink. The dead come alive, and they want revenge on the living.
It was working! What was it? Magnetism? The key was a conductor for electricity, that much was clear, but what type of metal was the key made of, anyway? She would need to do a full examination, a run of trials using every combination of metals she could identify.
Gleeful, Hazel continued to trace the key along the frog’s twitching limbs. But within a minute, the jerking slowed, and then stopped altogether. Whatever magic had been present in the weather, in the dead frog’s humors, in the fire poker, in the bedroom key—it had been spent.
The frog was dead again, and now, from the other room, Hazel could hear her mother weeping. She had wept most days since the fever took George.
From Dr. Beecham’s Treatise on Anatomy: or, The Prevention and Cure of Modern Diseases (24th Edition, 1816) by Dr. William R. Beecham, Amended by Dr. William Beecham III:
The Roman fever (Plaga Romanus) first reveals itself through symptoms of boils on the patient’s back. Within two days, the boils begin to burst, staining the back of the patient’s shirt with blood (hence the name “the Roman fever,” for the resemblance of several stab wounds to the back like Julius Caesar’s). Other symptoms include blackened gums, lethargy, decreased urination, and aches. Colloquial names for the disease: Roman Sickness, the Boils, Bricklayer’s Fever, the Red Death. Almost always fatal. An outbreak centered in Edinburgh occurred in the summer of 1815, claiming over five thousand souls.
Though the survival rate is dismal, those who do prevail retain immunity. There is no known cure.
Copyright © 2021 by Sidley Park