“I can snap corsets open faster than bones.” He held his knife up, his attention fixed on my chest.
He crassly slid his gaze over our bodies and offered a low, appreciative whistle.
The butcher stopped hacking the goat apart long enough to leer at us. Uncle wasn’t the only Wadsworth who enjoyed cutting open the dead. It was a good method to easily soak up blood for sweeping, one I was well acquainted with thanks to time spent in Uncle’s laboratory and at the forensic academy I’d briefly attended in Romania. Now that I was paying closer attention, I noticed a fine layer of sawdust around the butcher’s feet. “How appetizing.” My cousin Liza finally caught up and looped her arm through mine, tugging me out of the way as a man tossed a stuffed burlap sack across the sidewalk to a younger apprentice. I fought the growing urge to quietly recite the names of each muscle and tendon. It had been killed and skinned elsewhere, its exposed flesh a map of white and red, crisscrossing where fat and connective tissue met with tender meat. My attention drifted to the goat’s carcass. If I believed in an ever after, I might hope it was in a better place.
I drew closer, curious that the animal’s head didn’t tumble off the butcher’s block as I’d imagined-it simply rolled to the side of the oversize board, gaze fixed permanently toward the winter sky. The man set his weapon aside and yanked the goat’s body backward, neatly separating the head from its shoulders. The executioner-a sandy-haired man of around twenty years-worked the axe free and wiped its edge on the front of his bloodstained apron.įor a brief moment, with his shirtsleeves rolled back and sweat dotting his brow, he reminded me of Uncle Jonathan after he’d carved open a corpse. Without offering another word, I gripped my cane and moved forward, staring into dull black eyes as the blade finally came down, severing the spinal cord at the neck with a wood-splintering thwack. “Your uncle requested you both be taken directly to the-” The footman wet his cracked lips, his voice strained. Almost three weeks in New York and it still didn’t seem real. I blinked, nearly having forgotten where I was and who I was with. “Miss Wadsworth?” The footman reached for my arm, his focus darting around the throng of dirt-speckled people elbowing their way down West Street. A feeling akin to hunger awakened deep within, but I quickly swallowed it down. Watery sunlight dribbled off its edge like fresh blood, tricking me into recalling recent events. A blast of frigid air greeted me as I unlatched the carriage door and stumbled onto the street, my attention stuck on the raised axe.
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