Hazel tries to move on after Jack’s death. But is he really dead?
When we last left our plucky heroine, she was saying goodbye to Jack before he headed to the gallows. She slipped him the last of the elixir of immortality, but he refused to take it. He did take the bottle, though, so Hazel isn’t sure whether he tossed it and went to meet his end, or took it, survived the hanging, and made a break for it. If the latter, why hasn’t he contacted her?
To keep herself from dwelling on the thought, she keeps busy. When she’s not tending to the poor people of her village who can’t afford a “real” doctor, she’s working on her treatise. A medical textbook written for non-medical professionals so they can have a solid understanding of their anatomy and how to treat common illnesses and injuries if they can’t make it to a doctor.
She gets in trouble one night after helping a woman who had taken something to induce an abortion and had a bad reaction.
She refuses to give her real name or to tell Hazel who the father is. She does say she asked one of her coworkers about where to go for an abortion, now she’s afraid the woman will rat her out.
Sure enough, not only does the poor woman get caught, but Hazel is identified as the one who helped her with the illegal abortion, rather than merely helping a sick woman who had already had an abortion before arriving at Hazel’s door.
For some reason, Hazel isn’t allowed to defend herself in the course of the trial. Not sure if that was normal in Great Britain at the time, but it’s certainly galling.
Hazel is thrown in jail, and despite sending letters to her parents, has no guarantee they were even sent.
When she gets no reply, and her situation doesn’t improve, she resigns herself to her fate.
Of course, that’s exactly when she is rescued with as little explanation or ceremony as she was jailed.
As it turns out, Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate child of the Prince Regent, and the only legitimate grandchild of King George III, is suffering from a chronic illness no one seems to be able to diagnose, much less cure.
It’s gotten to the point where she won’t even let the doctors examine her.
Someone suggests to the Prince Regent that Princess Charlotte might be open to talking with a doctor who is of the same gender and similar age as herself. They just happen to have heard of a young woman in Edinburgh who fits the bill.
So Hazel is whisked from the jail to London without a chance to so much as return home to pack. She has to send a letter to her housekeeper, asking her to send along her things.
But she’s not the only doctor on the premises.
Another (rather cute) doctor has been summoned to try to help cure the king’s madness.
So far, he’s had very little luck. He has had some success in alleviating the symptoms, but he is far from a solid diagnosis, much less a cure.
Meanwhile, Hazel is invited to join a secret club called the Companions to the Death. Although, considering it’s supposed to be a secret club, a lot of people who aren’t in the club seem to know about it.
What they don’t know is that the members of the club have more in common with each other than a high level of intelligence and an interest in art, science, and/or culture. The other thing they have in common is they are all immortal.
As Hazel learns, Dr. Beecham did not discover the secret to endless life. He was a member of the club before going his own way.
The club assumes Hazel wants to join them, and they are surprised when she tells them she has no desire to become immortal. They decide to make an exception for her and let her hang out with them as an honorary member.
Hazel is determined to figure out the recipe for the tincture, as well as an antidote, although the woman who invented the tincture assures her there is no way to reverse the effects. And she and her husband are committed to keeping the ingredients of the tincture secret so members can’t go around giving the tincture to every loved one who gets sick or injured … you know, like Hazel did for Jack.
Instead, the group has to vote on every prospective member. Someone can nominate someone to get the elixir and be added to the group, but only if the majority of the group agrees the person “deserves” the elixir.
Turns out, the Companions to the Death are interested in more than just immortality. They have also been affecting global affairs, convinced they are the only ones with the perspective to make the “right” decisions.
At the same time, their immortality has given them such a disregard for human life that they will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.
While all this is going on, Hazel and the king’s doctor strike up a flirtation. But before that can go very far, Jack reappears.
You didn’t forget about Princess Charlotte, did you? Because it turns out she’s not as sick as she was letting on, but she has her own reasons for avoiding her duties as the Princess of Wales.
SPOILER ALERT!
The only thing I’m going to spoil about the ending is the fact that Hazel helps Charlotte fake her own death so she can run away with the love of her life and live as a normal person. As romantic as that is, and as much as I like the idea of giving Charlotte a happy ending, the truth is her untimely demise caused a crisis because no one knew who would inherit the throne after the Prince Regent. He and his wife weren’t going to have any more children, and none of his siblings had any legitimate children. I couldn’t forgive Hazel for letting her romantic notions run away with her to the point of endangering the entire British empire. It’s pretty hard to forgive Charlotte, too, since she would have had the importance of her duty to her country drilled into her from birth.
But, since the book is fiction, I can forgive this minor bit of alternative history. On the whole, I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I enjoyed the first book in this duology.