prologue
Paris, 1794
The square was filled with people who had woken up at dawn to see blood. They surrounded the wooden stage where the guillotine had been built, elbowing one another and pressing their bodies forward, each person trying to get as close to the action as possible. Those lucky few who had managed to get to the front of the crowd waved handkerchiefs—when the heads began to roll, they would try to dip the handkerchiefs in the blood. Souvenirs. An heirloom they could pass on to their children, and their children’s children. See? I was there, they would say, unfolding the bit of cloth. I saw the Revolution. I saw the traitors lose their heads.
The morning sunlight reflected off the white stone of the courthouse. Even though his hands were bound, Antoine Lavoisier managed to fix the cuffs of his shirt. He had worn his plainest work shirt to court that morning, a simple flax-colored thing; it was what he wore in his laboratory, knowing that it might get stained with sweat or one of the hundreds of chemical solutions he kept in glass vials. His wife, Marie-Anne, had threatened to throw it out a dozen times. Antoine had worn it today, hoping to prove to the judge and the braying crowd outside that he was a man of the people. For all the good it did, he might have worn silk brocade.
“Please,” he had told the judge. (That cursed word had almost caught in his throat; if the circumstance hadn’t been quite so dire, his nature would have made it impossible to beg.) “Please,” he repeated, “France needs my work. Imagine what I can do for the nation—for the Republic—if I have more time to continue my scientific studies. I’ve already achieved so much in the study of oxygen. Of hydrogen, the science of combustion! At least let me return to my apartment to organize my paperwork. There are years of calculations. The possibilities for—”
The judge interrupted with a hacking, phlegmy cough. “Enough,” he said. “The Republic needs neither scholars nor chemists who have stolen from the people. And the course of justice cannot be delayed any further.” He struck his desk with a gavel. “Guilty.”
Lavoisier sighed. “Pity,” he murmured to himself, too softly to be heard above the shouts and jeers from the gleeful crowd. Officially, Antoine Lavoisier had been charged with tax fraud and with selling unsuitable tobacco, swindling the common people by adding water to weigh it down. But he knew as well as anyone that he was really on trial for something else: being an aristocrat and an academic. For having spent the previous decade of his life with his wife, holding salons in their apartment with intellectuals and artists, events where Marie-Anne served tea and repartee and biscuits made by their servants.
France was changing, had changed, faster than Lavoisier had believed possible. There was a bloodlust in the air, a frenzy for something that was called justice but looked like cruelty. Half a dozen of his friends had already lost their heads over meaningless criminal charges that appeared in the middle of the night. The rest of his friends fled to London or Italy. The Lavoisiers had had their chance, too, to run away to England, but they weren’t able to leave their experiments. Their laboratory. They were so close.
Now it was too late.
Just a few months ago, Lavoisier watched as the queen herself was taken through the streets of Paris on the back of a cart, transported like so much lumber in an open cage so that loyal citizens of the Republic could see her face, could throw their rotting fruit and cabbages at her. Lavoisier had to force himself to look; the last time he had seen the queen, he had been a guest at Versailles, demonstrating a new form of chemical combustion for King Louis and his court. The queen had been wearing yellow satin, and her hair was powdered and teased a meter high, dotted with ostrich feathers and pearls. She had been laughing, he remembered that. She laughed when he’d made the small explosions—the smoke first blue, and then green, and then purple, meant to dazzle and amuse. Her face was young and her cheeks had high color.
The day they took the queen to the guillotine, Lavoisier saw that her face was drawn and lined. She looked like a woman decades older than she really was. Her hair had gone stark white and so thin that he could see her scalp in places. Her eyes, Lavoisier observed as the cart passed, were empty and blank. It was as if she had died already, a long time ago.
A guard with a bayonet pulled Lavoisier toward the stage. Some of the onlookers tried to trip him, or get in a blow as he walked past, but Lavoisier barely noticed, so focused was he was on scanning the thousands of faces for his wife, Marie-Anne.
“There!” he shouted.
The sun lit her from behind, her hair giving her a golden halo. She stood near the wooden steps of the platform, her eyes determinedly scanning the crowd, and her mouth straight and tight. The guard looked back at Lavoisier in confusion, not sure what he had shouted about.
Just then, Marie-Anne saw her husband, and she started swimming her way against the current of bodies to get to him.
The guard jostled Lavoisier, trying to force him along.
He resisted. “Surely the Republic’s justice can wait long enough for me to kiss my wife farewell?”
The guard sighed but paused and let the pair embrace. Marie-Anne whispered in her husband’s ear. No one noticed her pressing a small vial into his palm.
The guillotine’s blade was brown with blood. There had already been two beheadings that morning, and the straw onstage was matted and red. Someone held a basket, ready to catch Lavoisier’s head when it tumbled from his neck. Others held their white handkerchiefs aloft, hoping for blood splatter.
Marie-Anne Lavoisier didn’t watch her husband ascend the small wooden steps onto the stage. She didn’t want to know if he would shake, or if his legs might give out beneath him. There were even some stories of the condemned soiling themselves.
And so instead, she moved briskly through the crowd, away from the center of the square, toward their apartment, where she would gather as much of her husband’s research material as she could before the vultures came to scavenge whatever valuables they could claim. The new regime was seizing everything it could. Marie-Anne comforted herself with the notion that no matter who stole her husband’s papers, they almost certainly wouldn’t understand them.
She ducked down a small alley. Her footsteps were swift and sure. The crowd behind her inhaled in excitement. Words were shouted that she couldn’t make out. And then there came the unmistakable sound of a blade cutting through the air. Marie-Anne Lavoisier said a quick prayer for her husband, and for her country, and continued on.
1
Edinburgh, 1818
“This is going to hurt. I am sorry about that.” Hazel Sinnett didn’t feel as though there was any use in lying.
The boy bit down harder on the piece of leather she had brought for that very purpose and nodded. 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. 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.
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. That last part was going to hurt the most.