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i.
Once night falls and her family leaves, Belle unwinds the bandages from around her chest.
She’d been picking the edge of the cotton for hours, since she watched Jack being dragged away from her, since she tried to sit up, to protest, and was grabbed back into the bed by pain ripping through her body. She’d gasped and found no air, and the room around her had gone murky. By the time her eyes focused again, Jack was long gone.
The bindings come away easily, the linen square pressed against the wound less so. It sticks with dried blood, rips at the raw edges of her skin as she pulls it away bit by bit, letting her lungs drop empty before each little bite of pain in order to not make a sound. It comes clear on one final ragged gasp and suddenly the wound is before her.
The edges of her skin are dark with blood, the white thread gone black with it. The incision beneath is perfect, straight and clear, as easy as he’d done on the cadaver earlier, the stitching is clean and tight, but there’s no overlap between the two edges of skin, they meet exactly as they would have before the cut. The only flaw, the only betrayal of Jack, is the uneven spacing between the stitches, work that would have had her berated by her governess.
She touches the edge of the wound, just below her breasts, and follows the line down her abdomen. It’ll heal lovely, should she avoid infection, or complications. But she has no doubt of Jack’s handiwork.
It still hurts like a steel fist to the chest, a weight pinning her immobile. Each movement, each breath, carves through her, sharper than the scalpel blade. Her fingers shake as they skip over each stitch, the lightest of feather touches sparking bright and hot through her chest with every nudge of the thread.
She wishes, desperately, for a hand to hold besides her fathers. For Jack to press a kiss behind her ear and whisper to her all the things they’ll do and see once she’s healed. The stories he would paint for her with words never put down to the page, the tales he would bring in from the surgical theater would be something to cling to, to hold on to as the lantern flickers low and someone cries out in the ward.
Belle Fox has never needed a man by her side, had truly never expected to marry, even as a little girl, but just this once she longs to have a partner.
ii.
“Lady Belle, we must remove the stitches or the wound will heal around them, you know this,” says Sneed. That she’s being unreasonable goes loudly unsaid.
“I don’t need you to examine me, Dr. Sneed. Hetty can.” Belle stares her mother down hard, grit in her eyes that she knows only can be matched by Lady Jane herself. “Or Jack.”
Her mother’s jaw clenches and her eye twitches. She turns from the room without a word. The door slams shut behind her with a warble of the shuddering glass window.
“I’ll get the nurse,” her father says, trailing, following.
Sneed says nothing, but Belle can read the disdain on his face, and beneath that, the desperation. If she were a different kind of person she may acquiesce to appease him, she is the Governor’s daughter after all, it would be terrible for him if she died under his watch. But she isn’t that person. Never has been. Never will be. So she cannot do anything but stare past him, her own jaw clenched, hard enough to hurt, while she waits for him to leave.
Hetty comes in later, as the sun is cresting over the horizon. Belle’s room is empty, her family still fled, and her ire gone from sizzling and spitting to burnt.
She is just so tired.
The nurse wheels in a cart of instruments with her customary placid expression, though Belle knows it only hides her true thoughts, not that she lacks them. She peels back the layers of bandage, letting Belle pull the final linen square herself. It doesn’t stick like it used to, hasn’t bled in days.
Belle touches the thread, now stiff, dry, hard and formed to her skin, one last time. “I’ll do it myself, Hetty, thank you. If you could assist.”
Hetty nods, hands her a pair of shears, and Belle could weep at the ease of it, wishes she could find the words to thank her.
The metal is cold against her skin as she slips one blade of the shears between the stitch and her body, causing her to gasp in a breath. She forces herself to exhale slowly, then brings the blades together, severing the thread. One after another, she snips through each stitch that so precariously held her together.
A tear drips down her cheek before she realizes she’s crying. Hot and bold it carves down her face and drops onto her chest. She sniffs, but her hands don’t shake.
She cuts through the last stitch and exchanges the shears for forceps. Hetty doesn’t say a word.
Belle feels the slide of thread through her skin as she removes it. There’s little to no pain, the wound has healed properly, Sneed was right the stitches were overdue to be removed, but as she works, staring down her own breast, pulling each knot free, then holding it out for Hetty to catch in a tray, she can both feel every move she makes with the forceps in her own body, yet also feels as if she’s staring down a cadaver, looking over a corpse. There is a curious disconnect between her hand and her chest, somehow neither seems her own.
When the last bit of thread is pulled free she drops the forceps with a clang to the tray and presses her hand to her brow. It wasn’t shaking a second ago.
She swallows hard. “Thank you Hetty, I think I’d like to get some rest now.”
It’s dark outside, but the hospital is hardly quiet. Hetty will have a dozen other patients who need her more than Belle does. Still, she lingers a moment, touches the back of Belle’s arm. For a moment, it’s comforting.
“Well done, Lady Belle.”
iii.
Her own bed becomes her prison.
Belle thought it would be an improvement to the hospital, her own bed, her own space, her own books. No doctors running or patients calling out. No sounds of retching or dying from down the hall.
Instead, the house feels deathly silent.
She’s disallowed from her father’s study and library, from the kitchens, from the sitting room and the sun room. She’s not allowed to take the stairs by herself or to carry anything heavier than a feather. She may as well be quarantined and it leaves her foul, not unlike the household. Belle snaps whenever anyone enters her room and Mother skulks through the office and Fanny ‘mourns’ her beloved Oliver Twist and Father hides from the lot of them.
Sometimes when Belle wakes in the sticky afternoon heat, sweaty and heartsick, he’s there in a chair by her bed, slumped over in his own slumber. He snores, loud enough to wake her. A sound she’d forgotten, plumbed from the depths of her memory, from their house in London, where her nursery shared a wall with her parents bedroom.
She spends her days drifting, in and out of sleep, from her bed to her desk to her settee, through one book, then the next. The pain is constant, aching, each day she checks and the scar is nothing but a thin, pink line, but it’s the boredom that’s mind numbing, bearable only by a hair.
The nights though, are far far worse.
She dreams. She dreams of her aorta bursting, of blood running hot and fast and arterial from her wound, spilling, drenching her sheets. Of the cold, raw pain of that final attack, of her body finally giving out. She dreams she’s watching her own surgery, watching the men argue over her before the first cut is even made, watching her body turn cold.
Again and again she dreams of Jack at the gallows. Sometimes he sees her, tells her he loves her, cries, pleads, begs, tells her to run like she is also under threat. Sometimes he hates her, he is cold and unflinching as she cries. Sometimes he dies alone. She screams his name over and over, but he never hears her, never glances in her direction. Over and over again he dies, and she is powerless to stop it.
The nights are long and cold and bitterly lonely.
And across town she knows that his are the same. Worse, because he has no bed or space or books. That the only comfort she can bring him are the letters that she writes to keep herself awake through the darkness.
She keeps herself restrained though, because she knows Fagin will have to read them to him, and that Fanny will undoubtedly read them before they’re delivered. At least in the ones that she sends off to him. Beneath her mattress she stashes the others, the ones she writes in the thick hours of early morning, kissing the edges of delirium. In those she tells him how she loves him, the futures she’s dreamed up for them, how she thinks about their night together, his hands, his lips, his body over hers.
Her pen scrawls ink over page after page, staining her hands, staining the sheets, until the sunrise licks at the horizon and it’s finally safe for her to fall into blissful slumber.
iv.
“Belle.” Jack reaches out as if to touch her, then stops just shy. He constrains himself, and she wishes he wouldn’t. His gaze flicks down, burrs a hole below her sternum same as the one he cut.
“Could I see it?”
She swallows a remark about her breasts, about the things he’s already seen, at the agony on his face and instead reaches to pull the laces of her bodice. “Of course.”
She shucks the fabric to the side, fingers trembling just slightly as she unlaces her corset. He steps forward, finally, and helps her pull it loose over her head. Her skirts slump, but stay at her hips and she tugs her chemise out from them then pulls it up, baring her waist, baring her breasts. The cloth is awkward and heavy in her hand before she thinks, to hell with it, and shucks it off as well.
He swallows, and reaches unsteady hands out to frame her waist, falls to his knees before her so he’s eye level with it. The scar starts just below her breasts and ends at the top of her skirts. It’s healed now, thin and clean. Knit back together so closely to how she was before, but also irreparably different.
He presses his mouth to the edge of it, just above her skirts, just above her navel, and she cannot quiet her gasp. The skin is white and new and soft. So much more sensitive than that around it. She grips one hand into his hair as he kisses up the line of it.
“It healed much better than I expected.” He smooths over it with his thumb, like it was an errant drop of ink, of blood, he could smudge away with a licked finger. “My hands were shaking, by the end.”
She clasps his wrist, feels the thundering relief of his heartbeat. “Not during the important part.”
He puts his forehead to her. “I’m sorry.”
“Whatever for?”
“I cut you.” His lips to her abdomen again, ever so gentle. Reverent. Like her father used to kiss her forehead when she was a young girl, like she was the most important thing in all the world. The wet warmth of a tear drips onto her skin and slides away.
“Belle, I cut into you. And I thought I would kill you. You have no idea-”
She cups his jaw, brings his gaze back to hers. “You saved my life, Jack Dawkins, don’t you dare apologize for that.”
Tears cling to his lashes, but no more fall. “I love you,” he says, desperate, grasping. Like she’s slipping through his fingers, and she is, isn’t she?
She banishes the thought. “I love you too, but come on, help me get dressed. We still have work to do.”
He smiles at that, just like she wished, that perfect Jack smile where all his dimples show, the one that makes her think everything is going to be quite all right.