Chapter 11

I read for months, marking each day with a little check in a notebook I kept on my bedside table.

Félicité's pink starshine never faltered or faded, so when I grew tired of reading in the armchair or hunched over the worktable in the kitchen, I took my books outdoors. I'd spread out my velvet quilt in the center of the orchard and while the day away, studying charts of bones and ligaments, tendons and musculature.

Three months went by, then four, five, six, in a flash and flurry of pages.

I'd expected the Divided Ones to return, hoping they might be interested in my progress. I was eager to show them, to show anyone, how I was coming along. I yearned for a bit of encouragement, a speck of praise. I longed to have someone be aware of the work I was accomplishing.

But my reading list wasn't enough to tempt the fated gods' curiosity, and I remained alone.

More months ticked by.

Though I had a voracious appetite, often eating till my stomach stretched painfully for the simple reason that I could, the larder never ran out. The ice chest was always full. Dresses and skirts were replaced as I filled out, putting a comfortable amount of meat on my bones for the first time in my life. Merrick somehow even knew when I had a growth spurt after residing in the Between for five months. There was never an article of clothing that didn't fit me exactly as it should.

In addition to tallying the days, I kept track of the books I'd consumed, arranging them in stacks throughout the cabin like tiny towers. Sometimes I'd pile them too high and they'd topple over in the middle of the night, jarring me from sleep with the excited hope that my godfather had, at long last, returned.

But it was never him.

As I made my way through the collection, other things showed up in the cottage, correlating with what I'd been reading. After finishing a book on home remedies found in common herb gardens, I suddenly discovered a patch of black earth outside my door, as if the glassy basalt had broken apart to reveal a hidden layer beneath.

Days after the soil arrived, tiny shoots of yellow and green began to poke through the dirt, stretching out to the pastel pink sky. I recognized some of the plants from our garden back home and was further pleased when I could identify others from my studies, but there were quite a few that stumped me.

I brought out Merrick's botany guides and spent many afternoons thumbing through the pages, watching the plants grow and doing my best to classify them.

As the garden grew, so did my collection of tools. Mortars and pestles of various sizes filled the kitchen shelves. Glass vials with cork stoppers crowded spare drawers. I woke one morning to discover a set of beakers and flasks along the worktable, ready for me to begin mixing tonics.

I studied recipes for salves and teas, and soon gained the confidence to tweak the measurements, inventing my own concoctions and writing my observations down in a giant ledger I discovered ona side table one day.

I read and I tended my garden. I made brews and lotions, elixirs and potions.

I talked with the plants, giving them personalities and funny voices.

I wondered if isolation could make someone go mad.

In moments of extreme loneliness, I even found myself missing my family and trying to guess what they might be doing.

As I began to read through surgical procedures, scalpels and knives showed up in the cottage, as did whole hams in the ice chest. I practiced slicing into pig flesh until my hands were as steady as any surgeon's, and when my mind was too full of words, I passed the evenings by working on embroidery samplers I discovered beneath my bed. My stitches went from gaping and uneven to fine and straight, so tiny they were almost impossible to see.

Three days before my thirteenth birthday, I picked up the final unread book.

It was nearly five inches thick, smelling of dust and mold, an impossibly large tome on little-known surgical practices and filled with spidery copperplate illustrations showing how to insert catheters to open blocked bladders, the best ways to cauterize wounds, and how to remove sections of the skull to reveal the mess of brains beneath. I'd avoided the book for months, ever since I'd opened it and seen a long, squiggly worm being carefully pulled free of a skin lesion and nearly lost my lunch.

But Merrick wouldn't return until I finished reading every one of the books he'd left for me, so, steeling my resolve and my stomach, I opened the behemoth and began to read.

I was surprised to find the text far less disturbing than I'd feared. After spending so many months engrossed in physiology, I didn't consider the surgeries so barbaric. These were practices designed to help, not hurt; to heal, not wound. If I ever had cause to perform anything described in this book, it would be in pursuit of saving a life, one in dire straits.

The thought humbled me. I caught myself sneaking glances at my hands throughout the day, wondering if they were up to thetask.

Merrick had believed in me, even when I had not.

Merrick had said it was to be so, and after a year of living in the cottage he'd brought into existence through nothing but his own ferocious will, that seemed more important than anything else.

I read long into the night, turning in only when my eyelids began to flutter shut and I feared I'd miss learning something important in my drowsy state.

The next morning, over toast and jam, I read about the various ways one could trepan a patient. I learned how to drain weeping abscesses while sipping afternoon tea, and I practiced needling cataracts away from a clouded cornea on my hard-boiled eggs at dinner.

That night I dreamed of blood and bone matter but slept deep and well, and when I woke, I read some more.

The next day passed in a fog of incisions and instruments. I itched to recreate the surgeries I'd read of, to know what it was like to stretch open a wound, to feel the slippery heat of viscera, to set my tools down and know I had done a fine job. For the first time since Merrick had brought me here, I dreamed of becoming the healer he'd promised.

I woke on my birthday with only three chapters left and decided to venture outdoors with a breakfast picnic. Merrick's trees were inthe process of shedding their blossoms and pink petals rained down throughout the morning. When I finished the book, closing it with a moment of wistful reverence, the blossoms were tousled about in my hair, like confetti on festival days back in Rouxbouillet.

I rolled over and stared into the pastel sky.

I felt good.

Better than good.

I'd done it.

It had taken an entire year, but I'd read every single book that Merrick had left for me, and I'd read each one as a scholar would, studying with intent, referencing ideas and concepts in previous chapters and tomes, and while I'd never once treated an actual patient, I felt as though I could now.

My stomach rumbled and I flipped back over, pushing myself to my feet. I stretched, marveling at the giant expanse of free time laid out before me. The afternoon sparkled with dizzying potential.

"I'll make lunch," I decided aloud, swiping up the book and heading down the hill to my cottage. "Then weed the garden, and perhaps take a walk, and I will not look at a single book."

As I swung open the door of the cottage, I hummed a little tune, not realizing what it was—the birthday song Bertie used to serenade me with every year—until I spotted the cake on the worktable.

It was a decadent tower of lavender frosting, colored sugar crystals, and edible violets. A tiny forest of golden candles—thirteen exactly—sprang from its top and lit magically as I stepped inside.

I approached the cake curiously; I didn't notice my godfather sitting in the armchair, warming himself by the fire, until he cleared his throat.

"Happy birthday, Hazel."