Her Dark Curiosity
Her Dark Curiosity
Megan Shepherd
Inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this tantalizing sequel to Megan Shepherd's gothic suspense novel, The Madman's Daughter, explores the hidden natures of those we love and how far we'll go to save them from themselves.To defeat the darkness, she must first embrace it.Back in London after her trip to Dr. Moreau's horrific island, Juliet is rebuilding the life she once knew and trying to forget her father's legacy. But soon it's clear that someone – or something – hasn't forgotten her, as people close to Juliet start falling victim to a murderer who leaves a macabre calling card of three clawlike slashes. Has one of her father's creations also escaped the island?As Juliet strives to stop a killer while searching for a serum to cure her own worsening illness, she finds herself once more in a world of scandal and danger. Her heart torn in two, past bubbling to the surface, life threatened by an obsessive killer – Juliet will be lucky to escape alive.
MEGAN SHEPHERD
Her Dark Curiosity
To Peggy and Tim,
for a childhood filled with books & love
Table of Contents
Cover (#uf6ffd1dc-1fa8-5ac8-b629-323b97805b5e)
Title Page (#ua632d9e2-8296-56bb-b23a-6718376c9538)
Dedication (#ucf5db47c-cd63-5d25-bc68-df6d17bc7293)
Chapter 1 (#u3703a1dd-18f2-5b52-a945-d6f2279959aa)
Chapter 2 (#ufdebcf2e-5eb4-572e-9e1b-ee53db875946)
Chapter 3 (#u910773ce-d062-53f5-a781-5db4718ef082)
Chapter 4 (#uabb1d77c-00a0-542e-9ba4-033e428355d9)
Chapter 5 (#u7839c471-0fef-51ad-9bcb-668d4cab7db1)
Chapter 6 (#ud47856ba-501b-521b-8249-1cd71acd4e15)
Chapter 7 (#ucc08c142-ef09-5910-aeea-1b3c491d1949)
Chapter 8 (#u3d0711d8-815a-504e-8adc-2275fc5ba3e9)
Chapter 9 (#u06f73f44-1324-562a-8b6d-bba2356fa66f)
Chapter 10 (#u06672619-0706-57f5-acd2-8259061e99c2)
Chapter 11 (#ubdd2f232-0d9d-581d-b821-aa06e4fe0bdc)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Megan Shepherd (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1
The air in my crumbling attic chamber smelled of roses and formaldehyde.
Beyond the frosted windowpanes, the rooftops of Shoreditch stretched toward the east in sharp angles still marked with yesterday’s snow, as chimney stacks pumped smoke into an already foggy sky. On nights like these, I never knew what dangers might lurk in the streets. Yesterday morning a flower girl around my age was found frozen on the corner below. I hadn’t known her aside from glimpses in the street, one girl on her own nodding to another, but now her dark, pretty eyes would never again meet mine in the lamplight. The newspapers said nothing of her death – just one of dozens on such a cold night. I’d learned of it in slips and whispers when I made my usual rounds to the flower stalls and butcher stands. They told me she’d tried to stuff flowers between the layers of her meager clothing for warmth. The flowers had frozen too.
I pulled my patchwork quilt tighter around my shoulders, shivering at the thought. After all, a threadbare scrap of fabric wasn’t much more than crumpled flowers.
Winter in London could be a deadly time.
And yet, as I studied the street below where children trailed a chestnut roaster hoping for fallen nuts, I couldn’t help but feel there was something about the narrow streets that whispered of a certain familiarity, a sense of safety despite the rough neighborhood. The tavern owner across the street came out to hang a sparse holly wreath on her paint-flecked door, getting ready for Christmas in a few weeks. My thoughts drifted backward to memories of mincemeat pies and presents under a fir tree, but my smile soon faded, along with the fond remembrances. What good would presents do me now, when death might be just around the corner?
I returned to my worktable. The attic I let was small, a narrow bed and a cabinet missing a drawer arranged around an ancient woodstove that groaned into the night. My shabby worktable was divided in two halves; the right-hand side contained half a dozen twisted rosebushes in various states of being grafted. A flower shop in Covent Garden paid me to alter these bushes so that the same plant would produce both red and white flowers. The meager profit I made helped pay for the rent and the medical supplies on the left side of the table: a syringe from my previous day’s treatment, a package wrapped in butcher paper, and scrawled notes about the healing properties of hibiscus flowers.
I took my seat, letting the patchwork quilt pool onto the floor, and reached for one of the glass vials. Father had developed this serum for me when I’d been a baby, and until recently it had kept the worst of my symptoms at bay. Over the past few months, however, all that had begun to change, and I was growing more ill: muscle spasms, followed by a deep-seated ache in my joints, and a vertigo that left my vision dulled. The instant I touched the vial, my hand clenched with a sharp tremor, and the small container slid from my fingers and shattered on the floor.
‘Blast!’ I said, hugging my quaking hand to my chest. This was how the fits always began.
As flickering shadows from my lamp threw beastlike shapes on the roof, I cleaned the broken glass and then unwrapped the butcher’s package and smoothed down the edges. The smell of meat filled the air, ironlike, only just beginning to rot. My head started to spin from the odor. I lifted one of the pancreases. The organ was the size of my fist, a light fleshy color, shriveled into deep wrinkles. The cow must have been killed yesterday, maybe the day before.
Its death might mean my life. I’d been born with a spinal deformity that would have been fatal, if my father hadn’t been London’s most gifted surgeon. He’d corrected my spine, though the operation resulted in a scar down the length of my back and several missing organs that he’d been able to substitute in his desperation with those of a fawn. My body had never quite accepted the foreign tissue, resulting in the tremors, dizziness, and need for daily injections.
I wasn’t certain why the serum was failing now. Perhaps I was becoming immune, or the raw ingredients had altered, or perhaps now that I was growing from child to woman, my body’s composition was changing, too. I’d outgrown his serum just as I had my childish respect for him. His serum had only ever been temporary anyway, lasting a day or two at most. Now I was determined to create something even better: a permanent cure.
The pancreas’s puckered flesh yielded under my scalpel’s sharpened blade, separating like butter. It required but three simple incisions. One down the length. One to expose the glycogen sac. Another to slice the sac free and extract it.
I slid over the tray clinking with glass vials, along with the crushed herbs I’d already mixed with powders from the chemists’. This work had a way of absorbing me, and I scarcely realized how the afternoon was passing, or how cold the air seeping through the window was growing. At last I finished this latest batch of serum and waited impatiently to see if the various ingredients would hold. In order to be effective, the disparate parts would need to maintain cohesion for at least a full minute. I waited, and yet after only ten seconds the serum split apart like a bloated eel left too long in the sun.
Blast.
It had failed, just like all the times before.
Frustrated, I pushed my chair back and paced in front of the twisted rosebushes. How much longer could I go on like this, getting worse, without a cure? A few more months? Weeks? A log cracked in the woodstove, sending hot light licking at the stove’s iron door. The flames flickered like those of another fire long ago, my last night on the island. I had been desperate then, too.
Montgomery stood on the dock, the laboratory where he’d helped Father with his gruesome work blazing behind him. Waves lapped at the dinghy I crouched in, waiting for him to join me. We’d sail to London, put the island behind us, start a new life together. And yet Montgomery remained on the dock, let go of the rope, and pushed me out to sea.
But we belong together, I had said.
I belong with the island, he’d replied.
A church bell rang outside, six chimes, and a glance at the window told me night had settled quickly. I was late again, reliving memories I’d sooner forget. I grabbed my coat and threw open the door, dashing down four rickety flights of stairs until I was outside with the wind pushing at my face and the cold night open before me.
I stuck to the well-traveled, gaslit thoroughfares. It wasn’t the fastest route to Highbury, but I didn’t dare take the shortcuts through the alleyways. Men lurked there, men so much larger than a slip of a girl.
I turned north on Chancery Lane, which was busy at all hours with people loitering between pubs, and I hugged my coat tighter, keeping my eyes low and my hood pulled high. Even so, I got plenty of stares. Not many young ladies went out alone after dark.
In such chaos, London felt much like Father’s island. The beasts that lurked here just had less fur and walked more upright. The towering buildings seemed taller each day, as though they’d taken root in the oil and muck beneath the street’s surface. The noise and the smoke and the thousand different smells felt suffocating. Too closely packed. Ragged little children reached out like thorny vines. It felt as if eyes were always watching, and they were – from upstairs windows, from dark alleys, from beneath the low brims of wool caps hiding all manner of dark thoughts.
As soon as I could, I escaped the crowd onto a street that took me to the north section of Highbury. From there it wasn’t too far to Dumbarton Street, where the lanes were wide and paved with granite blocks, swept clean of all the refuse found in the lesser neighborhoods. The houses grew from stately to palatial as my boots echoed on the sidewalk. Twelve-foot-high Christmas trees studded with tiny candles shone behind tall windows, and heavy fir garlands framed every doorway.
I paused to lift the latch of the low iron gate surrounding the last house on the corner. The townhouse was three stories of limestone facade with a sloping mansard roof that gave it a stately air, as though it had quietly withstood regime changes and plague outbreaks without blinking an eye. It was on the quiet end of Dumbarton, not the grandest house by far, despite the fact that its owner was one of London’s wealthiest academics. I dusted off my coat and ran my fingers through my hair before ringing the doorbell.
The door was opened by an old man dressed in a three-piece black suit who might look stern if not for the deep wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, which betrayed his inclination to smile in a charmingly crooked way – a habit he gave in to now.
‘Juliet,’ he said, ‘I was starting to worry. How was your visit with Lucy?’
I smiled, the only way I knew to hide my guilt, and pulled off my gloves. ‘You know Lucy, she could chatter away for hours. Sorry I’m a bit late.’ I kissed his cheek as if that would make up for the lie, and he kindly helped me out of my coat.
‘Welcome home, my dear,’ he said.
2
Professor Victor von Stein had been a colleague of my father’s – and the man who turned him in to the police ten years ago for crimes of ethical transgression. The professor’s betrayal of their friendship might have bothered me when I was younger and still had respect for my father, but now I thought he’d done the world – and me – a favor. I owed him even more because, for the last six months, he’d been my legal guardian.
When I’d left Father’s island, I’d followed Montgomery’s instructions to find a Polynesian shipping lane and, after nearly three scorched weeks in the dinghy, was picked up by traders bound for Cape Town. From there, the expensive trinkets Montgomery had packed bought me passage to Dakar, and on to Lisbon. I’d gotten sick on the last leg of the voyage, and by the time I reached London was little more than a skeleton, raving about monsters and madmen. I must have said my friend Lucy’s name, because one of the nurses had summoned her, and she’d taken care of me, but my good fortune ended there. One of the doctors was an old acquaintance from King’s College by the name of Hastings. A year ago he’d tried to have his way with me and I’d slit his wrist. As soon as he learned I’d returned, he’d had me thrown in jail, which was where Professor von Stein had found me.
Lucy Radcliffe told me your circumstances, he had said. Is it true what you did to this doctor?
He needn’t have asked. The scar at the base of Dr Hasting’s wrist matched my old mortar scraper exactly.
It is, I’d said, but I had no choice. I’d do it again.
The professor had studied me closely with the observant eyes of a scientist, and then demanded I be released into his custody and the charges dropped. Hastings didn’t dare argue against someone so highly respected. The next day, I went from a dirty prison cell to a lady’s bedroom with silk sheets and a roaring fire.
Why are you doing this? I had asked him.
Because I failed to stop your father until it was too late, he’d replied. It isn’t too late for you, Miss Moreau, not yet.
Now, sitting at the formal dining table with a forest of polished silver candlesticks between us, I secretly kicked off my slippers and curled my toes in the thick Oriental rug, glad to put that old life behind me.
‘An invitation arrived today,’ the professor said from his place opposite me. The hint of an accent betrayed that he’d grown up in Scotland, though his family’s Germanic ancestry was evident in his fair hair and deep-set eyes. A fire crackled in the hearth behind him, not quite warm enough to chase the cold that snuck through the cracks in the dining room windows.
‘It’s for a holiday masquerade at the Radcliffes’,’ he continued, removing a pair of thin wire-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, along with the invitation. ‘It’s set for two weeks from today. Mr Radcliffe included a personal note saying how much Lucy would like you there.’
‘I find that rather ironic,’ I said, buttering my roll with the hint of a smile, ‘since last year the man would have thrown me into the streets if I’d dared set foot in his house. He’s changed his tune now that I’m under your roof. I think it’s you he’s trying to win over, Professor.’
The professor chuckled. Like me, he was a person of simple tastes. He wanted only a comfortable home with a warm fire on a winter night, a cook who could prepare a decent coq au vin, and a library full of words he could surround himself with in his old age. I was quite certain the last thing he wanted was a seventeen-year-old girl who slunk around and jumped at shadows, but he never once showed me anything but kindness.
‘I fear you’re right,’ he said. ‘Radcliffe has been trying to ingratiate himself with me for months, badgering me to join the King’s Club. He says they’re investing in the horseless carriage now, of all things. He’s a railroad man, you know, probably making a fortune shipping all those automobile parts to the coast and arranging transport from there to the Continent.’ He let out a wheezing snort. ‘Greedy old blowhards, the lot of them.’
The cuckoo clock chimed in the hallway, making me jump. The professor’s house was filled with old heirlooms: china dinner plates, watery portraits of stiff-backed lords and ladies whose nameplates had been lost to time, and that blasted clock that went off at all hours.
‘The King’s Club?’ I asked. ‘I’ve seen their crest in the hallways at King’s College.’
‘Aye,’ he said, buttering his bread with a certain ferocity. ‘An association of university academics and other professionals in London. It’s been around for generations, claiming to contribute to charitable organizations – there’s an orphanage somewhere they fund.’ He finished buttering his roll and took a healthy bite, closing his eyes to savor the taste. He swallowed it down with a sip of sherry.
‘I was a member long ago, when I was young and foolish,’ he continued. ‘That’s where I met your father. We soon found it nothing more than an excuse for aging old men to sit around posturing about politics and getting drunk on gin, and neither of us ever went back. Radcliffe’s a fool if he thinks they can woo me again.’
I smiled quietly. Sometimes, I was surprised the professor and I weren’t related by blood, because we seemed to share what I considered a healthy distrust of other people’s motives.
‘What do you say?’ he asked. ‘Would you like to make an appearance at the masquerade?’ He gave that slightly crooked smile again.
‘If you like.’ I shifted again as the lace lining of my underskirt itched my bare legs like the devil. I’d never understand why the rich insisted on being so damned uncomfortable all the time.
‘Good heavens, no. I haven’t danced in twenty years. But Elizabeth should arrive by then, unless there’s more snow on the road from Inverness, and I’ve no doubt we shall be able to wrangle her into a ball gown. She used to be quite the elegant dancer, as I recall.’
The professor stowed his glasses in his vest pocket. Elizabeth was his niece, an educated woman in her mid-thirties who lived on their family estate in northern Scotland and served the surrounding rural area as a doctor – an occupation a woman would only be permitted to do in such a remote locale. I’d met her as a child, when she was barely older than I was now, and I remember beautiful blond hair that drove men wild, but a shrewdness that left them uneasy.
‘You know how the holidays are,’ he continued, ‘all these invitations to teas and concerts. I’d be a sorry escort for you.’
‘I very much doubt that, Professor.’
While he went on talking about Elizabeth’s Christmas visit, I dug my fork beneath my dress and scratched my skin beneath the itchy fabric. It was a tiny bit of relief, and I tried to work it under my corset, when the professor cocked his head.
‘Is something the matter?’
Guiltily, I slid the fork into my lap and sat straighter. ‘No, sir.’
‘You seem uncomfortable.’
I looked into my lap, ashamed. He’d been so kind to take me in, the least I could do was try to be a proper lady. It surely wasn’t right that I felt more comfortable wrapped in a threadbare quilt in my attic workshop than in his grand townhouse. The professor didn’t know about the attic, and only knew a very limited account of what had happened to me over the past year. I had told him that the previous autumn I’d stumbled upon my family’s former servant, Montgomery, who had told me that my father was alive and living in banishment on an island, to which he took me. I’d lied to the professor and said Father was ill and passed away from tuberculosis. I had claimed that the disease had decimated the island’s native population and I’d fled, eventually making my way back to London.
I had said nothing of Father’s beast-men. Nothing of Father’s continued experimentation. Nothing of how I’d fallen in love with Montgomery and thought my affections returned, until he’d betrayed me. Nothing of Edward Prince, either, the castaway I’d befriended, only to learn he was Father’s most successful experiment, a young man created from a handful of animal parts chemically transmuted using human blood. A boy who had loved me despite the secret he kept carefully hidden, that a darker half – a Beast – lived within his skin and took control of his body at times, murdering the other beast-men who had once been such gentle souls. Edward was dead now, his body consumed in the same fire that had taken my father. That didn’t mean, however, that I’d ever managed to forget him.
By the time I looked up, I found the professor’s attention had strayed to his newspaper. I returned to my baked hen, stabbing it with my fork. Why hadn’t I seen Edward’s secret? Why had I been so naïve? My thoughts drifted to the past until the professor let out a little exclamation of surprise at something he read.
‘Good lord, there’s been a murder.’
My fork hovered over my plate. ‘It must have been someone important if it’s reported on the front page.’
‘Indeed, and unfortunately, I knew the man. A Mr Daniel Penderwick, solicitor for Queensbridge Bank.’
The name sounded vaguely familiar. ‘Not a friend of yours, I hope.’
The professor seemed absorbed by the article. ‘A friend? No, I’d hardly call him a friend. Only an acquaintance, and a black one at that, though I’d never wish anything so terrible upon the man as murder. He was the bank solicitor who took away your family’s fortune all those years ago. Made a career of that dismal work.’
Uneasiness stirred at the mention of those darker times. ‘Have they caught his murderer?’
‘No. It says here they’ve no suspects at all. He was found dead from knife wounds in Whitechapel, and the only clue is a flower left behind.’ He gave me a concerned glance above his spectacles, then folded the paper and tossed it to the side table. ‘Murder is hardly proper dinner conversation. Forgive me for mentioning it.’
I swallowed, still toying with the fork. The professor was always worried that whenever an unpleasant topic of conversation arose, I’d think of my father and be plagued by nightmares. He needn’t have worried. They plagued me regardless.
After all, I had helped kill Father.
When I looked up, the professor was studying me, the laugh lines around his eyes turned down for once. ‘If you ever need to discuss what happened while you were gone …’ He shifted, nearly as uncomfortable with such conversations as I. ‘I knew your father well. If you need to resolve your feelings for him …’ He sighed and rubbed his wrinkles.
I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated his efforts, but that he would never understand what had happened to me. No one would. I remembered it as if it had happened only moments ago. Father’s laboratory burning, him locked inside, the blood-red paint bubbling on the tin door. I feared he would escape the laboratory, leave the island, and continue experimenting somewhere else. I’d had no choice but to open the door. A crack, that was all it had taken, to let Jaguar – one of my father’s creations – slip inside and slice him apart.
I smiled at the professor. ‘I’m fine. Really.’
‘Elizabeth is better with this sort of thing. You’ll feel more comfortable with another woman in the house, someone to speak with freely. What would a wrinkled old man know about a girl’s feelings? You’re probably in love with some boy and wondering what earrings to wear to catch his eye.’
He was only teasing now, and it made me laugh. ‘You know me better than that.’
‘Do I? Yes, I suppose so.’ He gave his off-balance smile.
It wasn’t my way to be tender with people, but the professor was an old curmudgeon with a kind heart, and he’d done so much for me. Kept me from prison. Given me elegant clothes, kept me fed on French cuisine, and done his best to be the father figure I should have had.
On impulse I went to his end of the table, where I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and kissed his balding head. He patted my arm a little awkwardly, not used to me showing such emotion.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For all you’ve done for me.’
He cleared his throat a little awkwardly. ‘It’s been my pleasure, my dear,’ he said.
After dinner I climbed the stairs, jumping as the cuckoo clock sprang to life in the hallway. I considered ripping the loud-mouthed wooden bird out of its machinery, but the professor adored the old thing and patted the bird lovingly each night before bed. It was silly for him to be so sentimental over an old heirloom, but we all have our weaknesses.
I went to my room, where I locked the door and took out the silver fork I’d stolen from the dinner table, pressing my finger against the sharp tines. The professor had set up accounts at the finer stores in town for me, but what I needed was cash – paper money for my secret attic’s rent, for the equipment and ingredients for my serums, and grafting roses only paid so much. I stared at the fork, regretting the need to steal from the man who’d given me a life again. But as I looked out the window at the dark sky and saw the snow falling in gentle flakes, flashing when hit by the lights of a passing carriage, I told myself I was desperate.
And desperation could lead a person to things one might never do otherwise.
3
That night, like most nights, I lay in my sprawling bed, staring at the ceiling, and trying desperately not to think about Montgomery.
It never worked.
When I had moved into the professor’s home, he had wallpapered my bedroom ceiling in a dusky pale rose print. Now, my eyes found hidden shapes among the soft buds, remembering the boy who would never give me flowers again.
‘He loves me,’ I whispered to nothing and to no one, counting the petals. ‘He loves me not.’
When I’d been a girl of seven and he a boy of nine, he’d once accompanied us to our relatives’ country estate. One morning after Mother and Father had gotten in a terrible row, I’d found a small bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace on my dresser. I’d never had the courage to ask Montgomery if he’d left them. When Mother found the flowers, she tossed them out the window.
Weeds, she had said.
Years later, he’d given me flowers on the island, when we were no longer children and he’d outgrown his shyness. He’d won my affection, but his betrayal had left my heart dashed against the rocks, broken and bleeding.
‘He loves me, he loves me not,’ I whispered. ‘He’ll forget me, he’ll forget me not. He’ll find me, he’ll find me not …’
I sighed, letting the sounds of my whispers float up to the rose-colored wallpaper. I rolled over, burying my face in my pillow.
You must stop with such childish games, I told myself, as the place beneath my left rib began to ache.
The next morning the professor took me to the weekly flower show at the Royal Botanical Gardens, held in the palatial glass-and-steel greenhouse known as the Palm House, where I found myself surrounded by ranunculus and orchids and spiderlike lilies, and where the only things more ostentatious than the flowers were the dozens of fine ladies sweating in their winter coats. A year ago I’d never thought I would find myself wearing elegant clothes once more, amid ladies whose perfume rivaled the flowers, who tittered about my past behind my back but wouldn’t dare say anything to my face.
It was shocking how much one’s fate could twist in a single year.
The professor, who I was quite certain wished to be anywhere but in a sweaty greenhouse surrounded by ladies, wandered off to inspect the mechanical system that opened the upper windows, leaving me alone to the sly looks and catty whispers of the other ladies.
… used to work as a maid …
… father dead, you know, mother turned to pleasing men for money …
… pretty enough, but something off about her …
Through a forest of towering lilies, a woman in the next aisle caught my eye. For a moment she looked like my mother, though Mother’s hair had been darker, and she’d been thinner in the face. It was more the way this woman hung on the arm of a much older white-haired man, dressed finely with a silver-handled cane. The woman wore no wedding ring – so the man was her lover, not her husband.
The couple paused, and the woman stopped to admire the lilies. I was about to leave when I overheard her say, ‘Buy me one, won’t you, Sir Danvers?’
Sir Danvers. I gave him another look, discreetly, studying the expensive cane, the bones of his face. Yes, it was he. Sir Danvers Carew, Member of Parliament, a popular lord and landowner – and one of the men who used to keep my mother as his mistress. He’d seemed kind, like his reputation, until he turned to drink. He had once knocked Mother around the living room, then struck my leg with that same cane when I’d tried to stop him. I hadn’t thought of him in years, and yet now my shin ached with phantom pain from that day.
I turned away sharply, though there was no danger of him recognizing me. Back then I’d been the skinny child of a mistress he hadn’t kept but a few weeks, and now I was one of the elegant young ladies come to admire hothouse flowers in winter.
‘May I show you these lilies, miss?’ a vendor across the aisle said. I turned my head, still a bit dazed by the memories. ‘They’re a new hybrid I developed myself,’ she continued. ‘I cross-pollinated them with Bourgogne lilies from France.’
Eager to be away from Sir Danvers, I pretended to admire the flowers. The blooms were beautiful, but the hybridization had made the stems too thick. They would have done better crossed with Camden lilies to keep the stems strong but delicate. I didn’t dare start talking aloud about splicing and hybridization, though – I’d have sounded too much like Father.
I swallowed. ‘They’re beautiful.’
‘There you are!’ called a voice at my side. Lucy came tripping along the steam grates in a tight green velvet suit, fanning her face. ‘I’ve been up and down every hall looking for you. Oh, this blasted heat.’ With her free hand she dabbed a handkerchief at the sweat on her forehead. Beneath our feet, the boilers churned out another blast of steam that rose as in a Turkish bath. I inhaled deeply, letting it seep into my pores. I felt healthier here, in the tropical warmth, where the symptoms of my illness never seemed quite as bad.
Lucy glanced rather disdainfully at a bucket of mangled daisies with broken stems. ‘Good lord. It looks as though someone pruned those flowers with a butter knife.’
‘It isn’t about the sharpness of the blade,’ I said. ‘It’s about the hand that holds it.’
‘Well, if you ask me, that hand isn’t anything special either. Must we come here every week? What do I care for flowers, unless a young man is giving them to me?’
I smiled. ‘Which dashing young man would that be? You seem to have quite a few these days.’
Her powdered cheeks grew pinker as she brushed by a display of orchids, absently knocking their petals to the floor. ‘Papa prefers John Newcastle, of course, and I know he’s handsome and a self-made man and all that, but he’s so boring. And then there’s Henry, and my goodness, I simply can’t abide him. He’s from Finland, you know, which might as well be the end of the earth. He hadn’t even seen an automobile until one practically ran him over in Wickham Park.’
As I watched her carelessly knock over an entire plant, I said, ‘For a boy you keep claiming to dislike, you certainly seem to dwell on him.’
She gasped with indignation and rattled on more about her other suitors, but I only half listened. I’d heard all this before, time and time again, different young men depending on the week. I nodded absently while I stooped to clean up the flowers she’d knocked over.
‘Really, Juliet,’ Lucy said in exasperation. ‘You must remember you’re not a maid anymore.’
I paused. She was right. I lived with a wealthy guardian now and was back in good social standing. Seeing Sir Danvers and remembering my mother’s fall from grace had made me relive my former shame all over again. At the far end of the aisle, Sir Danvers and his mistress admired some orchids. He tapped the cane on the steel grates at his feet, sending vibrations all the way to where we stood. I had the sudden urge to stride over, snatch the cane from his hand, and slam the silver tip into his shin, as he had once done to mine. For a man his age, it wouldn’t take much force to shatter the bone.
My hands itched for that cane. More tittering laughter came from behind me, cruel and high-pitched, and I imagined the flower show ladies whispering among themselves.
… violent tendencies …
… well, with a father like hers …
Itch, itch, itch. But I forced myself to turn away. The professor wanted to prove I could be a respectable young lady despite who my father had been. The only problem was, being respectable wasn’t nearly as second nature as I had thought it would be.
I turned my back on them, facing the frost-covered wall of the greenhouse, beyond which I could make out the shadowy shapes of falling snow. As I watched, a black police carriage pulled up outside. My breath froze. Ever since Scotland Yard officers had arrested me in response to Dr Hastings’s accusations, I’d been jumpy around policemen.
All that is behind you, I reassured myself.
But the carriage stopped, and a handsome officer perhaps ten years my senior climbed out, and through the glass panes dripping with condensation, he looked directly at me.
I turned toward the sprays of ferns, Sir Danvers forgotten, thoughts racing. If this had been Father’s island, I could have disappeared into those vines with silent steps I’d learned from his beast-men. But large as the greenhouse was, the police would find me in minutes.
Lucy gave me a strange look, dabbing at her brow. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’
‘The police are here,’ I whispered. I jerked my chin toward the door at the far end of the palm court, where the groan of the heavy iron door sounded. I should get away from Lucy. It would only humiliate her to have her friend arrested so publicly.
I started for the door to intercept him, but Lucy grabbed my arm. ‘The police? Oh, don’t tell me you’re still afraid of the police. That was ages ago, and everything was sorted out. And look at you; you’d look like royalty if you’d just stop slouching so much. Only criminals slouch.’
My heart pounded harder as the officer appeared through the vines that draped from the catwalk above. He was a tall man with a sweep of chestnut hair that matched Lucy’s, and he walked with the confidence of the upper classes. Not a beat patrol officer, then. They’d sent someone important for me – how thoughtful. He was dressed in a fine dark suit with an old-fashioned copper bulletproof breastplate beneath his cravat, and a pistol at his hip.
My muscles twitched, urging me to flee, but Lucy’s arm still held me.
‘Oh, him?’ She sighed. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. He’s not here for you. Papa must have sent him to collect me.’
I looked between the officer and Lucy, still not understanding. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s John Newcastle, the suitor Papa’s so fond of,’ she said. ‘I was just telling you about him. Weren’t you listening? Really, Juliet.’
I stared at her. ‘You didn’t say he was a police officer!’
‘He isn’t a police officer,’ she said, fluffing her hair where the humidity had made it go flat. ‘He’s an inspector. Scotland Yard’s top inspector.’ Her voice dropped to a mutter. ‘He’s rather fond of telling me how important he is, not to mention handsome. He’d marry himself, I do believe, if he could.’
‘Lucy—’ I started, but Inspector Newcastle reached us then and gave us a dashing smile, his eyes only darting to me in a perfunctory manner before settling on Lucy.
‘Lucy, darling.’ He bent forward to kiss her cheek, which left a glistening mark that she dabbed at with the handkerchief.
‘Papa sent you, I presume?’
‘He invited me to supper, and I offered to come collect you.’
She pounced on my arm again. ‘John, this is my friend Juliet Moreau. Oh, Juliet, I’ve a fine idea. Go ask the professor if you can join us for a bite to eat.’ Her insistent wink told me she didn’t want to spend an extra moment alone with her suitor.
‘Yes, you’re welcome to join us, Miss Moreau.’ He extended his hand to take mine, but as soon as my fingers were in his, his hand tightened. ‘Have we met before? Your name sounds somewhat familiar.’
I glanced at Lucy. ‘I don’t believe so, Inspector. I think I would remember.’ I extracted my fingers from his grasp, wishing I could just as easily remove his suspicions about my name from his thoughts. I nodded my chin toward his copper breastplate. ‘What an unusual piece. Is it an antique?’
‘Why, yes,’ he said, clearly pleased. ‘It belonged to my grandfather. A lieutenant in the Crimean War. Kept him alive despite five bullets and a gunpowder explosion. I try to be a modern man, and we have better protective garments these days, but a little sentimental superstition can be healthy, don’t you think?’ He tapped his breastplate good-naturedly.
I smiled, relieved I’d managed to distract him from my name.
Lucy slid her arm into mine and said, ‘Juliet’s quite a tragic case, I’m afraid. Both parents dead, left penniless. She even had to work at one point.’
She started to lead me toward the door, but I pulled away a little too fast. I had errands to run before returning home, errands I had to keep secret.
‘Thank you for the offer, but I’ve plans with the professor. It was a pleasure meeting you, Inspector. I’ll see you soon, Lucy.’
I ducked away from them and found the professor amid the crowd, still engrossed by the rusted mechanics of the greenhouse. He smiled warmly when he saw me.
‘I wondered if you’d mind if I had a bite to eat with Lucy,’ I said.
‘Well, certainly,’ he said, eyes twinkling. Now he could go home to his books and a thick slice of Mary’s gingerbread cake. I kissed him on the cheek and hurried through the tunnel of palms to the doorway, where I could at last be on my own. I took one last breath of the thick, warm air, before pushing the heavy door open and bracing for the cold.
A swirling gust of snow ruffled my velvet skirts. The botanical garden’s ice-covered lake spread in front of me, the water sprite fountain in the center now frozen under a waterfall of ice.
I’d get an earful from Lucy later. She wouldn’t like that I’d left her to fend off John Newcastle’s kisses alone. But just being around the police – even a well-mannered inspector – made me nervous.
And I had my errands to run.
I drew my fur-lined coat around my neck and waited behind the frozen skeleton of an azalea for Inspector Newcastle and Lucy to leave. They climbed into the black carriage amid pleasantries I couldn’t make out, save for a single curse from Lucy when her skirt caught on the curb. I smiled at her impropriety as their carriage rolled away over the cobblestone.
Pulling my coat tighter, I made my way toward Covent Garden. The sun was already heading for the horizon, so I slipped into an alleyway that would cut my walk by half. The alley was quiet, save for a pair of cats chasing each other through abandoned crates.
Ahead of me a short young man approached from the opposite direction, cap pulled low over his brow so his face was hidden in shadows. As our paths grew closer, he took his time looking me up and down, giving me gooseflesh. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and I noticed that he was missing his middle finger – a difficult detail to ignore. I stiffened. The only reason an otherwise warmly dressed man wouldn’t wear gloves on a day this cold was if he planned on needing his dexterity for something.
I stepped into the street to pass him with a wide berth, but he spun around and walked alongside me. The hair on the back of my neck rose. I forced myself to keep walking, hoping he’d just doubled back on some forgotten errand, even though I knew it was too late for wishes. I glanced at my boot, where a knife was hidden – a trick I’d learned from Montgomery.
‘Spare a coin, miss?’ the man asked, suddenly right at my side, in a voice that seemed unnaturally deep. His bare fingers reached out, the missing middle finger leaving an unnatural vacancy.
I jerked away. ‘Sorry, no.’
‘With those fine buttons? Come on, miss. Just a coin. It isn’t safe out here, alone on the streets. Not safe for a girl at all.’
I saw his arm twitch a second before he grabbed my coat. I ducked out of his grasp and pulled the knife from my boot, then shoved him against the curb at the right angle for his ankles to catch. It threw him off-balance and he fell. I collapsed on top of him, knee digging into the soft center of his chest, knife at his throat, as I checked the alley to make certain we were alone.
His cap fell back, and I started as shoulder-length red hair tumbled out around a pretty face. A girl younger than me, disguised as a man, which explained the put-on deep voice. That was good – a girl I could scare off. A man I might have had to inflict some damage upon.
‘I know it isn’t safe,’ I hissed. ‘What do you think knives are for?’
I pressed the knife closer against her neck, watching the flesh wrinkle beneath it. Her eyes went wide.
‘I didn’t mean nothing!’ she said, voice substantially higher now. ‘Please, miss, I swear, I just wanted them buttons!’
I narrowed my eyes at her, digging my knee deeper until I felt a rib, and then gave an extra jab before climbing off her.
I jerked my chin toward the opposite street. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘And next time put some lampblack on your chin to look like a beard, and for god’s sakes wear gloves; your bare hands gave you away instantly.’
She scrambled to her feet, brushing the muck off her clothes, and stumbled away at a run. I sheathed the knife in the boot holster, then wiped a trembling hand over my face, breathing some life back into my cold hands.
I took off at a brisk walk, still shaken, the afternoon clouds overhead the only witness to the incident I couldn’t forget fast enough, until at last I saw the shining lights of Covent Garden.
4
The market was filled at all hours with a vast range of people, and I gladly plunged into the safety of their midst. Ladies in fine dresses shopped for Christmas presents, scullery maids swarmed past the wrinkle-faced vegetable women, tailors and seamstresses haggled in the textile quarter. My fine coat and boots caused no one to give me a second glance, until I slipped into the meat section of the market. Few fine young ladies could stomach these narrow passageways. Eels as long as my arm twitched on hooks above lambs’ glassy dead eyes, and stray cats licked up the salty blood pooling on the floor. By the time I reached Joyce’s Choice Meats, I was getting nothing but strange looks.
Jack Joyce, however, tipped his hat to me.
Joyce, an Irish ex-boxer who’d turned to the meat trade in his old age, cracked a broken-toothed grin as I approached. His previous profession had left him not only minus a few teeth but with a permanent squint eye that never seemed to be looking in the same direction as the other. A small black dog with a white spot on his chest and notable only in his ugliness, wagged his tail.
‘Hello, Joyce,’ I said, and then knelt to scratch the dog’s bony head. In general, I did my best to stay away from animals. They only reminded me of the dark experimentation Father had done. That was why I limited myself to plants. Roses couldn’t kill, or maim, or betray.
‘And hello to you too, boy.’ I picked up the dog, though he was heavy in my arms. ‘He’s put on a pound or two, I believe.’
‘Aye. Soon enough he’ll be fatter than a queen’s lapdog, if you keep buying him scraps. And just as lazy.’ Joyce took his knobby old hands away from his fire and dug around behind the counter until he came back with some chicken bones that he tossed to the dog.
Technically, the dog was mine. He’d started following me around town ever since I’d first come to Joyce’s Meats six months ago. It was the meat in my pocket he smelled, and the only way I could get him to keep from trailing at my heels was to pay Joyce to keep him well-fed on scraps, a task that despite his grumbling, I suspected, the old boxer rather enjoyed.
‘Let’s see,’ Joyce said, digging around beneath the counter. He came up with a package wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine. ‘Here’s your order. Two pancreases, one liver. Couldn’t get my hands on the deer heart you wanted. I should have it next week.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, slipping the package into my pocket. Just being here stirred the bones of my hands from their slumber, made them remember what Father had done to me. I flexed them, hoping to hold off the symptoms of another fit.
The dog finished his chicken bone and barked at Joyce, who stooped down on his bad knee and scratched the dog’s head. ‘When are you going to give this ugly fellow a name already?’ he asked.
I leaned against the counter, watching the dog thumping his tail. ‘He isn’t my dog.’
‘Don’t think he understands that.’
‘My guardian wouldn’t care much for a stray in his house. I fear I’m already uncivilized enough for him.’ I didn’t mention how the last dog I’d named, a puppy called Crusoe, had died under Father’s scalpel. The thought made my stiff hands ache more, and I pushed them into my coat pockets.
Joyce grinned. ‘Aw, you could use a companion. Keep him in a back garden. How about Romeo, eh? Romeo and Juliet, you were made for one another.’
‘I was made for a flea-ridden stray?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Though in any case, Romeo doesn’t suit him. Who’s that boxer you’re always talking about? The underdog. That mutt’s an underdog, if I’ve ever seen one.’
‘Mike Sharkey,’ Joyce said. ‘Pride of Ireland. He beat that big Turkish bloke four to one. What do you say, fella? Are you a Sharkey?’
I watched Joyce pet him and scratch beneath his chin. Joyce had always been friendly with me, and never once asked what a well-dressed young woman wanted with so many animal organs.
‘Hope you’re taking care out there, miss, walking around town on your own, especially this late in the afternoon. It’ll be dark soon. You’ve heard about the murders, I wager?’
‘Which murders? This is London. There are a dozen murders every day.’
His eyes went serious beneath his brow. ‘Didn’t read the morning paper, did you?’ He rooted around in the stack of old newspapers he used to wrap cuts of meat and slapped one down on the table.
‘A MASS MURDERER IN THE MAKING?’ the headline read.
‘Three murders in the last two days,’ Joyce said. ‘Scotland Yard says they’re connected; the murderer leaves his mark at each crime scene. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. They’re calling him the Wolf of Whitechapel on account of how he claws up the bodies. One of them had a purse on him and a gold watch, but the murderer didn’t touch it. Wasn’t interested in anything but tearing that man apart like an animal.’
Like an animal.
The twist in my gut grew to a desperate squeeze, and I had to lean on the counter to catch my breath. Like an animal, that’s how Edward had killed his victims. Ripped their hearts out with six-inch claws.
My hand slid to my chest, pressing against the hard whalebone corset. On the island, I’d seen a woman with her jaw ripped off. Buzzing flies. A blood-stained tarpaulin. Mauled, like all the others.
To this day, even so long after his death, my heart wrenched to think that Edward had killed so many of the islanders. He had seemed such an innocent young man, and yet beneath his skin lurked a monster.
A monster created by my father.
‘Christ, didn’t mean to frighten you, miss. I forget you’re a proper lady sometimes.’
‘It’s quite all right, Joyce,’ I said with a shaky smile.
I started to pick up the package to go when he said, ‘You just be careful, miss. Flowers dipped in blood, that’s his mark. That’s how they know the bodies are connected.’
I slowly turned back to him. The professor had said that a flower had been found beside the body of that terrible solicitor, Daniel Penderwick, who had taken my family’s fortune on behalf of the bank. Shocked that I had been acquainted with the first victim of what the police thought might be a mass murderer, I pointed toward the paper. ‘On second thought, do you mind if I read that article?’
He passed me the newspaper and I pored over it carefully. There was Penderwick’s name, listed as the Wolf of Whitechapel’s first victim. A second victim had been found last night, torn apart with violent wounds, and a white flower left nearby. The victim’s name made me start.
Annie Benton.
A creeping feeling began in my ankles, making my toes curl. Annie Benton had been my roommate when I worked as a maid at King’s College. She’d had a bad habit of digging through my belongings. A few months ago she’d gotten back in touch with me under the pretense of friendship, but had then stolen my mother’s small diamond ring – the only thing I had left of her.
I leaned against the butcher’s stand to steady myself. If I’d read Annie’s name in any other context, I would have been seething with anger, but the thought of her murdered by such violent means left me feeling strangely hollow and out of place, as though time was moving backward.
Was it coincidence that I’d known two of the victims?
‘These are the only murders? Annie Benton and Penderwick?’
‘Rumors of another one found just an hour ago. Unidentified body – so they claim,’ Joyce said. ‘I’d like to think there won’t be more, but Scotland Yard don’t have much to go on.’
The creeping sensation ran up the backs of my legs. My vision started to go foggy as blood pooled in my extremities. I gripped the butcher’s stand harder and accidentally brushed against one of the glassy-eyed pig’s heads. I jumped and cried out.
‘You feeling all right, lass?’
‘Yes,’ I stuttered. ‘Here – some coins for this package, and to keep the dog fed. I should go.’
‘I’ll see you next week for the usual order?’
I nodded before leaving, still clutching Joyce’s newspaper, along with the meat. It wasn’t until I was halfway to Highbury, and the sun had dipped behind the skyline, that I realized I’d taken the wrong road.
I’d wandered into the seedy end of Whitshire, where rats outnumbered the people ten to one and more gaslights were broken than not. The hair rose on the back of my neck, reminding me of my altercation with the girl thief earlier. I’d been lucky that time to escape unharmed. I might not be lucky again.
I took a deep breath as I mentally worked out a map for the direction I needed to go to get me back to a well-lit street. I hurried past a dress shop full of headless mannequins, taking care to avoid the open street, but a foggy feeling crept upon me.
Stay near the lampposts, I told myself. Stay near the light.
I turned the corner onto a shadowy street with only a single lamp glowing at the far end, and my heartbeat sped. After a few minutes I felt the neck-tingling sensation that I was being followed, and considered reaching for the knife in my boot. But as I strained my ears, I made out only the sound of little footsteps that stopped when I stopped, and when I whirled around to face my pursuer, the little black dog was behind me. He wagged his tail.
‘Oh, Sharkey,’ I gasped. He ran over and I gave him a good scratch. ‘You weren’t supposed to follow me! I haven’t time to take you back to the market now – I’ll be late getting home as is.’ I sighed. ‘Well, come on.’
It was a quiet evening, save for the wind that ruffled the strands of hair that had come loose from my braid. I hurried through the streets with Sharkey at my heels, though I hadn’t a clue how I’d explain him to the professor. Lock him in the garden, perhaps, until morning. It was impossible to think about anything but the murders, until I nearly stepped on a white flower on the ground in front of me.
I stopped.
A flower itself was rare enough in winter. I knew all too well how much care and tending they needed to stay as fresh as this one was. It lay all by itself on a patch of sidewalk wiped of snow as though someone had left it for me, creamy white petals radiating from a gold center, a delicate stem no thicker than a bootlace.
A tropical flower.
There was a rustle in the alleyway to my side – a rat, no doubt – and the dog took off after it. I knelt in front of the flower. Five petals, not unlike the ones that had grown on Father’s island. Montgomery had picked one, once, from the garden wall and tucked it behind my ear. The memory of Montgomery made the place around my rib throb with familiar hurt.
He loves me, he loves me not …
My heart twisted at the memory, and I turned to go. I should get home, before I was late for supper and the professor grew suspicious. But the flower was so beautiful, delicate as a whisper there in the snow, that I couldn’t leave it.
I pulled off a glove and reached down to pick it up.
As soon as I did, I knew something was wrong. My bare fingers touched a wet substance beneath the flower. I held my fingers up to the faint light from the lamppost.
Blood.
Blood spotted the back of the flower, as though it had been pressed into a pool of it. It was still fresh.
5
Flowers dipped in blood, Joyce’s voice echoed. That’s his mark.
In a blind panic I stumbled to my feet, screaming for Sharkey. His little face peeked out from the alleyway.
‘Come here, boy!’ I cried.
He took a few shaky steps toward me, and my eyes went to the tracks he left in the snow.
His paw prints were bloody.
‘Sharkey!’ I raced toward him, scooping him up and checking his feet, his legs, his body for cuts, but it wasn’t his blood in the snow, and I set him back down. Whose blood was it? He must have tracked the blood from within the alleyway, and whatever he’d seen or smelled in there now made him shiver and bury his snout in the fold of my arm.
The light was dark, and I fumbled for a matchbox in my coat pocket. I knew I shouldn’t look, and yet it was impossible not to. I lit a match and took a step deeper into the alleyway, then another, and another, despite my every sense screaming to turn away. The match light caught on a dark pile of rags in the corner, splashed with blood that smelled sharp in the crisp air. A pale hand lay beneath the pile, missing a middle finger, heavily bruised as though it had been trampled.
I jolted with recognition – the girl who tried to steal my silver buttons not but an hour ago, now trampled and bleeding. Murdered.
I took in the crime scene in flashes of the flickering match, my mind whirling as I stumbled closer, then away, then closer yet again, my instincts caught in a frantic fight-or-flight, curiosity winning in the struggle. I could only see tears in her men’s clothing, smell the blood. In my delirium, it brought back too many memories from the island.
A crack of ice sounded behind me. I gasped, afraid I wasn’t alone, and broke into a frantic run with Sharkey at my heels. I raced through the snow, ignoring the burn in my lungs. Sweat poured down my back like oozing fear, and my strangled breath grew shallower the farther I ran, past the row of closed doors, past the dress shop with headless mannequins, into the wider street where lights shone like beacons of safety.
I collapsed in the doorway of a closed bakery and glanced behind to make sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone other than Sharkey, who trotted up beside me. Visions of the girl thief’s body haunted me. Steam still rising from the body, signaling a fresh kill. The murderer must have been there moments before – the murderer Scotland Yard was so desperately hunting. The man who had killed Daniel Penderwick. Annie Benton. An unnamed victim.
And now one more.
The wind blew cold enough to make my teeth ache. A rusty hinge groaned, and I jumped back into a run. It all threatened to overwhelm me – the thief’s body curled in the snow, the bloody flower – and I had to choke back a sob. At last I reached the church on the corner and turned onto Dumbarton Street, where I slowed to a jittery walk. Sharkey trotted beside me, still shivering. I picked him up and wrapped him in the folds of my coat as best I could, mindless of the blood getting on the fabric.
It wasn’t easy to climb the professor’s garden trellis with the dog tucked inside my coat, but I managed. The window had a keyed lock, but I had broken through that my second night in the house. Hydrochloric acid was easy to get from the chemist’s, and it dissolved iron even in small doses. After that it had been a simple matter of replacing it with a similar lock to which I held the key.
I eased the window up as quietly as I could and climbed inside. I wiped Sharkey’s paws with a handkerchief before setting him on the rug, then tore off my coat and stripped out of my dress and corset and all the trappings I was made to wear, leaving them pooled in the corner of the room.
Tomorrow I’d hide the bloody clothes from the maid.
Tomorrow I’d see things clearly again.
Today, though, all I could manage was to dress in fresh clothes and grab another coat, then climb back out of my window and return to the front door so the professor wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong. I smoothed my hair back, checking my hands one last time for flecks of blood, and then pressed a trembling finger against the door chime.
An eternity passed before Mary answered, drying her hands on a cotton towel, her face flushed from the kitchen fire. She had the smell of ginger on her and a streak of rust-colored cinnamon across her apron, but all I could think of was blood, and my stomach lurched.
‘Evening, miss.’ She barely glanced at me as she brushed away the streak of cinnamon. I had to force my body to step into the foyer. Close the door behind me. Lock it tight.
From the dining room came a half-strangled sound like a cat dying, and my nerves flared to life again. I should tell someone about the body. I must. And yet the police would have certainly found her by now. If I said anything, there would be questions: why was I in such a rough neighborhood, not at tea with Lucy where I belonged …
Mary sighed as another mechanical shriek came from the dining room. ‘It’s that clock of his,’ she whispered. ‘Broke this morning while you were out, and he’s gotten it into his head to fix it himself.’ Another strangled cry of the wood bird sounded. ‘Maybe you can convince him to take it to the clockmaker.’ She sniffed the air suddenly. ‘The gingerbread!’
As she fled to the kitchen, I undid the buttons of my coat, glancing up the stairs toward my bedroom where the little dog was hidden from the world along with the bloodstained coat. My fingers felt stiff, my limbs like wood. I entered the dining room like a ghost, and I must have looked the same, but the professor was so occupied by the broken clock that he didn’t do more than glance at me as I sank onto one of the straight-backed dining chairs at the table.
I wanted to rest my head in my hands. I wanted to tell him everything.
‘Blast these tiny parts,’ he muttered, holding up a spring no larger than his fingernail. ‘They were made for nimbler fingers.’
The wooden clock sat upright on the table, its insides laid out as the professor performed his mechanical autopsy. He hadn’t practiced surgery in over a decade, but his skill was apparent in the way he cataloged the clock’s parts, testing each one methodically for faults. I kept my hands clasped under the table, my mind still too numb for words.
Mary brought out a plate of gingerbread cut into star shapes, warning us not to eat too many and ruin our appetites, though that hardly stopped the professor. I couldn’t yet face returning to my room, to the dog who had trod in a dead girl’s blood, and to the stains on my coat. Besides, watching the professor work calmed me. He was careful and attentive, but he paused for bites of cake. So unlike my father, who had been so serious. So unlike me, too.
I stayed up quite late to avoid the secrets stashed in my bedroom, long after Mary left for the day and the professor retired to bed. Then, by the light of a lantern, I worked on the clock myself, using an old book of mechanics to repair the broken gears that were too small for the professor’s arthritic old fingers. At last I replaced the final screw and closed the clock’s wooden door. When the professor woke in the morning, it would be to the god-awful squawk of that blasted bird he loved so much. It wasn’t much to repay his kindness, but it was something.
At last I climbed the stairs with weary limbs and closed myself in my bedroom. The fire had long since gone out. When I called Sharkey, he came out from under the bed, blinking, and something broke inside me.
I grabbed him and slid between the covers, my body wracked in shivers, and pulled the little dog against me. We shivered together under the expensive duvets and sheets, neither of us belonging in so fine a house.
There was no sleep for me that night. I tried to picture the alleyway again, to remember exactly what the thief girl’s wounds had looked like, but the match light had been so faint, and my fear had been a distorting lens. Certainly it wasn’t strange that a girl who’d tried to rob me had later ended up dead. She was a criminal, after all, and she’d been in a dangerous neighborhood. Maybe she’d tried to pick the wrong pocket, or gotten in a brawl, or someone had found out there wasn’t a man’s body under that clothing.
I let these dangerous thoughts unfurl in my head, exploring them cautiously, feeling their weight. After some time, when I was certain the professor was fast asleep, I climbed out of my warm bed where the little dog snored softly, and relit the fire. Once it crackled to life, I knelt by my pile of crumpled clothes, ready to burn them. I could smell the blood on them, along with something more fragrant – pollen.
I dug through until I found the flower. Why had I kept it? I should have thrown it to the street, but for some reason I’d slipped it in my coat pocket instead.
I could still get rid of it. Burn it in the fire. Throw it out the window.
Instead, I kept the flower separate and burned my bloody coat and dress. With trembling fingers, I carefully placed the flower within the pages of my journal. I don’t know what instinct made me keep such a bloody memento of a murderer. Call it sentimentality. Call it curiosity.
Just don’t call it madness.
6
In the morning, the previous day’s adventures seemed as unreal as nightmares, and yet the flower pressed within my journal was real enough, as was the sleeping dog beside me.
All trace of my bloody coat had burned in the fireplace except for the silver buttons, which I slipped into my pocket. I wasn’t looking forward to telling the professor I’d need a new one. I pulled out Jack Joyce’s newspaper and reread the article again. The familiar names of the victims stared at me from the page, as did another name – Inspector John Newcastle. Lucy’s ambitious young suitor had been chosen to lead the investigation into the Wolf of Whitechapel, and I wasn’t certain whether this news was welcome or not; as much as I loathed the idea of seeking information from the police, Inspector Newcastle might be able to give me more clues about the murderer and his victims. But how could I possibly explain my interest to the inspector? Well-bred seventeen-year-old girls weren’t fascinated by murder suspects, as a rule. If I said three of the four victims had personally wronged me, I’d become the prime suspect.
My fingers clenched the newsprint. If only Montgomery were here, he’d know what to do. He had always been better than me at these things: investigating, tracking, lying. For the longest time I’d thought him a terrible liar, and yet in the end, he’d fooled me well enough. I could still remember his voice: You shouldn’t have anything to do with me. I’m guilty of so many crimes. He’d warned me plain as day, and yet I’d still fallen in love with him, believed we had a future … and now here I was, alone with ink-stained fingers, only a dog for company and an old man who didn’t begin to know the truth about me.
I skipped over Inspector Newcastle’s name and let my gaze linger on the last line of the article, a line that I’d barely glanced at in my hurry yesterday: ‘The bodies are being kept in King’s College of Medical Research until autopsies can be performed to shed light on the exact nature of the deaths.’
King’s College – I knew those dark hallways only too well. I’d scrubbed blood from the mortar there, dusted cobwebs from between skeletons’ bones. That was where Dr Hastings had decided a simple cleaning girl wouldn’t dare refuse his sexual advances, and I’d slit his wrist. I still remembered the crimson color of his blood on the tile.
The last thing I wanted to do was return to those hallways.
And yet the bodies there called to me, promising to tell me the answers buried within their cold flesh.
It was a call I couldn’t resist.
I dressed and came downstairs with a lie prepared about needing to do some Christmas shopping in the market. To my surprise, I heard sounds of arguing and found the professor in the library with a visitor, a stout man with stiff waxed hair and thick glasses whose face froze when he saw me standing in the doorway.
‘Ah, Juliet, you’re awake,’ the professor said, rising to his feet. His mouth was still tense from their argument, but he forced a smile as he pulled me into the hallway.
‘Who’s that man?’ I asked, trying to peek around his shoulder.
‘Isambard Lessing. A historian, one of the King’s Club men. No need to concern yourself with him; he’s here to inquire about some old journals and family heirlooms. Did you need something?’
‘I was thinking of going shopping. This close to Christmas—’
‘Yes, yes, a fine idea,’ he said, herding me toward the stairs. He fumbled in his pocket for some bank notes and pressed them into my hand. ‘I’ll see you back here for supper.’
I muttered a silent prayer of thanks that he was distracted and wasted no time hurrying from the house with Sharkey. I took the dog to the market and firmly deposited him with Joyce, so by the time I got to King’s College – wearing an old apron over my fashionable red dress – classes were already in session for the morning. I entered through the main double doors into the glistening hallway with polished wood-inlay floors and wall sconces bearing electric lights. My boots echoed loudly in the empty hallways. I’d never felt comfortable on this main floor, the realm of academics and well-off students from good families. Grainy photographs lined the walls showing the illustrious history of the university and its construction. One brass frame bore the crest of the King’s Club with the motto underneath: Ex scientia vera. From knowledge, truth. I thought of stiff Isambard Lessing and his red face. I paused to look at the date on the frame’s inscription.
1875. Four years before I was born. The photograph documented the King’s Club membership at the time, two lines of a dozen male faces wearing long robes and serious expressions. Lucy’s railroad magnate father, Mr Radcliffe, was among them, his beard much shorter, standing next to a stout man I recognized as Isambard Lessing himself, and with a shudder I recognized a young Dr Hastings. I also found the professor’s face among them, decades younger but with the same wire-rim glasses and a hint of a smile on an otherwise stern face. On his left was a young man whose face I knew all too well – my father.
I shifted in my stiff clothing. The professor had mentioned they’d met in the King’s Club, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the photograph Father had dark hair cut in the fashion of the time, and his eyes were alert and focused, so unlike his wild-eyed, gray-haired visage I had known more recently. The face in the photograph was the face I knew from my earliest memories, when I’d idolized him, before madness and ambition had claimed him.
I tore myself away from the old photograph and hurried for the stairs to the basement, where I felt instantly more at ease. The morning cleaning crew was already hard at work scouring the stairs leading to the basement hallways. I recognized my old boss, Mrs Bell, as her rounded body stooped to scrub the treading. A woman who used to watch out for me when no one else did. When she stood to refill her bucket, I grabbed her hand and pulled her around the corner.
‘Mercy!’ she cried, putting a hand over her heart. ‘Juliet Moreau, is that you? My, but you gave me a fright.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bell. I wondered if I might ask you a favor.’
‘You aren’t wanting your old job back, I hope,’ she said, then cocked her head at the fine dress beneath my apron. ‘No, I suppose not …’
‘It isn’t about that. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a change in fortune, and it’s only right for me to share.’ I fished in my pocket for the silver buttons and pressed them into her hand before she could object. ‘I just need to know if you’ve already cleaned the hallways on the east side.’
The buttons jangled in her callused hand. ‘Heading there next, right after we finish these stairs.’
I bit my lip, glancing at the two other cleaning girls. ‘Could you start on the west side instead? It’s a long story … a student friend of mine thinks he might have dropped some cufflinks there and I’d like to look for them.’
She gave me a stern look, and I half expected her to ask what the real story was, but luckily for me she just threw her hand toward the hallways.
‘Have at it, girl.’
I started past the steps, where a rail-thin cleaning girl was polishing the brass handrail. Her basket sat beside her, filled with a collection of cleaning tools that were all quite familiar to me. How many hours had I spent on hands and knees on this very floor, sleeves hitched above my elbows, scrubbing so hard my knuckles bled? What a lonely life that had been, with only my memories to keep me company. How easily I could be back there if not for the professor.
The skinny girl turned around when she saw me staring at her basket. Her eyes went to the dirty apron that didn’t quite match my fine dress – an incongruity only the poor would notice.
‘Can I help you … miss?’ she asked.
‘Oh no,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. My mind was wandering.’
She nodded, still looking at me strangely, then returned to work. Once her back was turned, I bent down to pretend to lace my boots and secretly grabbed one of the brushes out of her basket, a soft-bristled one meant for cleaning fabric. If I ran into anyone here, I might need it as disguise. I hid it in my apron and hurried down the stairs into the basement.
The electric lights were on, buzzing and clicking, spilling artificial light over the tiles. Fresh sawdust had been sprinkled on them to soak up any blood fallen from patients or bodies. I wound my way down another corridor and paused at the closed door to the storage rooms where they kept cadavers for autopsies.
I peeked through the keyhole to make sure the room was empty. Unwanted memories returned of a night a year ago when Lucy and I had come here on a dare, only to stumble upon medical students dissecting a live rabbit. My arm twitched, just as that rabbit’s hind leg had, and I clamped a hand over my arm to keep it calm, hoping the rest of my illness’s symptoms wouldn’t soon follow. Through the keyhole, I spied cold tables draped with clothes.
Voices came down the hall, making me jump.
‘Old coot doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground,’ one said.
Whoever they were, their footsteps were headed my way. I pulled the soft-bristled brush out and stooped to hands and knees on the sawdust-covered floor just as two medical students rounded the corner.
‘You can’t expect him to—’ The one speaking paused when he saw me, but then continued. ‘You can’t expect him to graduate you when he couldn’t even pass the exams.’ The two students stepped over my arm as I pretended to scour the floor. One glanced back briefly, but I made sure to keep my face toward the ground. Cleaning girls weren’t worth anything to boys like them except a quick glance to see if they were pretty.
They neared the corner and I started to let out my held breath, until I heard a third voice behind them, clearly belonging to an older man.
‘Bentley! Filmore! Stop right there.’
My spine turned to ice. I knew that voice, even without looking at its owner. Dr Hastings – the professor who had attacked me last year and caused me to flee London. I fought the urge to panic and forced my hand to move rhythmically over the tiles, pretending to clean the mortar with a useless soft-bristled brush. As his footsteps neared, I cringed.
‘Yes, Doctor?’ one of the boys said, considerably more polite now.
Dr Hastings came to stand beside me. I glimpsed his silver-tipped shoes before quickly looking away.
Focus on the tiles. Focus on the tiles. Focus on the—
‘Don’t think I don’t know about those pranks you’ve been pulling. It’s one thing for boys to have a bit of fun, but quite another to chase me down Wiltshire at night. I nearly broke a shoelace.’
‘It wasn’t us, Doctor, I swear!’ one of them sniveled.
I didn’t worry about being recognized by most professors here – they never bothered to glance at the cleaning crew. But Dr Hastings had always been different. I think he liked to think of us on our hands and knees, cleaning up the messes he made. If he found me here now, he could do anything to me and not a soul would ever know.
I swallowed, wondering if I could crawl backward and scoot away. But to my relief, the two students had his entire attention. He stepped around me and started after them down the hall, chastising them about schoolboy pranks. The moment they were around the corner I leaped up, shoved the brush into my apron pocket, and snuck into the autopsy room.
I waited ten seconds, twenty, a minute, and heard no more voices. A shiver ran down my back as I found a switch on the wall. The artificial electric light snapped to life, bathing the room in a garish glow so much starker than the hurricane lamps my father used in his laboratory.
Eight tables lined the walls, four of which were occupied with cadavers. Each body was covered with a heavy cloth. One was large, over six and a half feet tall – that had to be Daniel Penderwick, the solicitor. In my memory he’d been tall as the devil himself, with just as black a heart. I lifted the cloth and looked at his pale, dead body. His naked chest was gutted open with slash marks now drained of blood. The wounds pulled me to them. They whispered truths – memories – I wasn’t certain I wanted to ever recall.
I approached the next body cautiously, uncertain who I’d find beneath the heavy cloth. Annie’s body would be here, as well as the thief girl’s. But what of the unidentified one? Would it be familiar to me, like the others? Could I still call it all a coincidence if it was?
I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart now torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.
I went to the next table, shakily leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie – or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved this?
Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I pulled back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we’d scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boarding-house’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.
It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping wounds in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for violence. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.
Eventually I moved on to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look in case it was someone dear to me, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked in surprise. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided with the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.
I recognized the fourth body.
It was the old white-haired man from the flower show, Sir Danvers Carew, the beloved member of Parliament who had once abused my mother and me. I’d seen him only days ago, and now … dead. I closed a hand over my mouth as my mind crawled over his pale face, his bloodstained skin, trying to understand. He had the same slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object. Like a cane. No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surely his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.
Four. I knew all four victims.
And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.
The idea made me step away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it – nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, four people who had wronged me.
Almost as though …
I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.
… almost as though someone was watching out for me.
I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.
A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.
By Edward.
Edward is dead, I told myself. The dead don’t come back.
And yet the fear kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already aching. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. On the island, I had read and memorized meticulous autopsy reports from Father’s files for all of Edward’s victims. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.
I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.
They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.
I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.
The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, there was no doubt.
Edward had done this.
7
I felt like the room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.
Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.
Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London – why? If it was only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.
My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.
We belong together, he had said. We’re the same.
Was that why he had returned, as part of a grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat after I’d spurned his advances?
I paced, hands knitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone …
Hands trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the bodies. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.
I couldn’t shake this new information: He’s alive. Alive. Alive.
Footsteps came from down the hall, and I spun, expecting to find Edward’s yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.
Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.
My heart shot to my throat. ‘Excuse me,’ I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.
‘Miss … Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?’
‘Nothing, Inspector,’ I stuttered. ‘Visiting some old friends.’
His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. ‘You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.’
‘Oh no, that isn’t what I meant. I used to work on this cleaning crew last year, before the professor took me in. I hadn’t seen them in a year, so …’ I swallowed, watching as his eyes followed my footsteps in the sawdust-covered floor to the storage room. My footsteps contradicted me. He’d know I’d been in there with the bodies.
My heart pounded. He could so easily make trouble for me, being down here where I wasn’t supposed to be, snooping around bodies. The professor’s guardianship could protect me only so far.
‘I came to check on the autopsy report for the latest victim of the Wolf of Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘But I would be happy to escort you back to the main floor.’
I sighed in relief. ‘That’s not necessary. I know my way. And I really must be going.’ I smiled as graciously as I could and turned away, heart pounding, feet unsteady on the tile floor. All I could think of was Edward. All I could feel was a thousand tangled emotions.
‘Wait, Miss Moreau.’
My eyes fell closed, only for an instant. I turned around with another shaky smile. The inspector wasn’t smiling now, as he dropped his voice to a whisper.
‘After I met you, I looked up your name. I’m protective of Lucy, you understand, and your name sounded so familiar. I found a police report …’ He glanced down the hallway, making sure we were alone. My instincts jumped to attention. A dozen scenarios flashed through my head of what I’d do if he tried to arrest me. All of them ended poorly for me.
‘It was self-defense,’ I said firmly. ‘Dr Hastings attacked me. I was a cleaning girl then; no one would believe me—’
He dismissed that with a wave. ‘None of that interests me. I’ve no doubt it was Hastings’s fault – it isn’t the first incident of this sort with his name on it. No, Miss Moreau, the reason I recalled your name was because of your father’s crimes, not your own.’
My body froze, afraid to take a single breath.
At my silence, he continued. ‘I was young at the time, in college training to be an investigator. The case was quite notorious. I went back and read the file on your father, and it seems the case was never closed. He fled England, and no one heard from him again. I hate to leave this sort of thing open, if we can file it away as a solved case. Your assistance, Miss Moreau, would be invaluable to our efforts.’
I stared at him, speechless. After I’d been hiding from the police for the last year, now they were coming to me for help? I might have laughed, if I hadn’t feared sounding like a madwoman.
‘I assure you, you can trust me,’ he continued. ‘We’ll handle the information in the most sensitive manner. It isn’t my intention to cause a sensation, just to solve a long-standing case. It would be a feather in my cap, you see, even lead to a promotion. Together with this Wolf of Whitechapel case, I would be made head of the entire division. Which means I’d be better suited to care for Lucy.’
‘Care for Lucy?’
He smiled boyishly. ‘It isn’t official, of course. I haven’t yet asked her father for her hand in marriage, but I know he’ll give me permission. Any day now, expect to get the news of our engagement.’
There was something undeniably tender about the way he said it. I was quite certain Lucy had no idea the inspector’s intentions were this immediate. My head whirled with the idea of Lucy wed, and Newcastle wanting me to help solve my own father’s case, and among it all, Edward. Alive.
Mrs Bell rounded the corner and stopped short when she saw us. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
I took the opportunity to step away from Inspector Newcastle. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s nothing I can help you with. I’ve heard rumors that my father is dead – I might trust those, if I were you.’
Before he could respond, I bade farewell to him and Mrs Bell, and hurried from the hallways where the electric lights still clicked and sputtered, as if warning me to never come back.
8
As soon as I left King’s College, I rounded the edge of the building and slumped against the rough brick wall, fighting to calm my erratic heartbeat. The day was clear but bitingly cold. My coat hung open, my hands bare, yet I didn’t reach for my gloves nor do up my buttons. I couldn’t. All I could manage was to slide down the brick wall to the frozen grass and let the cold seep up from the ground into me.
Edward was back from the dead.
If he truly was alive, if he had done this, then he must have been following me for some time. My mind searched through the past few weeks and months, trying to remember if I’d felt like I was being followed. But that was just it – one always felt followed in this city. Always felt eyes, always heard footsteps.
A flock of ravens alighted in the central courtyard, and my head whirled around. Was he following me even now? So many places to hide: behind those skeletal trees, on the rooftop of a nearby building …
I hugged my knees tight, not daring to close my eyes. If he knew about Annie stealing my mother’s ring, what else did he know? Did he know about my secret workshop and my growing illness? Did he know how I was stealing from the professor? Did he know that back on the island I’d opened the laboratory door so Jaguar could kill my father?
It terrified me that Edward might know all my secrets. If he chose to, he could expose me. Hurt me for how I’d hurt him when I’d rejected his affections. People loved a good gruesome rumor. If he revealed that the vilified Dr Moreau’s daughter had murdered her own father, this city’s gossip mills would devour me alive.
I ran numb fingers over my face, thinking. Edward was tied up in all those secrets too. Exposing my secrets would also expose his own – his unnatural origin and his inclination to kill. No, the more I thought about it, the more I was certain it wasn’t my secrets he was after.
Maybe it was my life.
A tingling started deep in my spine. For all I knew, I could be Edward’s next target. He could merely be toying with me, killing those who had wronged me to create a false sense of safety before he struck. After all, I’d rejected his love and then left him for dead. I could hardly expect him to do anything logically. How much control did Edward really have over himself? Where was the line between Beast and man?
Yet if Edward had wanted to kill me, there were far more effective ways. I’d given him a thousand opportunities to strike as I slunk along Shoreditch at night on my way to my secret workshop. And I might have left him for dead, but I’d prevented Montgomery from slitting his throat. I had given him a chance.
So what were these bodies supposed to tell me? If he meant me no harm, why hide behind such macabre gestures of affection?
It’s different with you, Juliet, Edward had said. We belong together.
He’d been wounded before he’d been able to explain what he meant by that plea for help. As I leaned against the brick wall, body ravaged by too many emotions, I wondered if Edward Prince had come back to London with that in mind. Not to destroy my life with rumors, not to claw out my heart, but to confess his love once more.
A hundred uncertainties twisted at my heart. The question was, Who else had to die first? Who else had wronged me? I could give him a list, I thought blackly, starting with Dr Hastings. But I immediately regretted such thoughts. Edward was the murderer, not me. The truth was, he had to be learning about all these people from somewhere. No one knew about Annie stealing that ring except for Lucy. Perhaps she told someone; perhaps Lucy wrote it in a journal that he’d found.
Could he be following Lucy, too?
Before I knew it, my feet were racing along the streets toward Lucy’s neighborhood, throwing glances over my shoulder. I didn’t dare involve her in any of this, and yet I needed to make sure she was safe. Edward could be anywhere. I made my way toward her house in the finest part of town, where the muddy snow had been cleared from the streets. Every manor was stately here, even finer than in the professor’s neighborhood, and each home was decorated for the holidays with mistletoe over the entryway.
Lucy’s family’s mansion was impossible to miss, a four-story red-brick palace on the most prominent corner, by far the grandest house in Belgravia. A wall of perfectly trimmed hedges designed to keep the riffraff out circled the rounded brick turrets. An iron gate opened onto the front walk to the imposing entryway topped with a holiday garland that smelled of pine.
I paused by the gate, casting another cautious glance over my shoulder. The smell took me back to my childhood, when I used to come here for parties. We’d had the most beautiful carriage then. I remembered soft lace curtains and peach upholstery. Montgomery would sit up front with the driver, learning his duties as groomsman, while Mother and Father and I rode in silence in the back until we pulled up at this very gate. Montgomery would take my hand – never meeting my eyes, as a proper young groomsman – and help me down from the carriage. The place beneath my left rib throbbed again at the memory.
A door slammed and a maid appeared in an upstairs window with a rug and duster. I started to pull my hood over my hair and duck away, but I reminded myself that I was once again welcome in this house. The Radcliffes had forbidden Lucy to see me after Father’s scandal, but now that I was ward of the illustrious Professor von Stein, they had no problem smiling at me like nothing had happened. I approached the front door and knocked.
Clara, the maid, answered the door while wiping her hands on a rag. Her face lit up when she saw me. ‘Miss Juliet! What a treat – we haven’t seen you around here much.’ She paused. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, miss. Are you ill?’
I shook my head, though she was closer to the truth than she could imagine. ‘Is Lucy home?’
‘She’s in the salon with her aunt. Shall I tell her you’re here?’
I hesitated. My heart thumped with the need to make certain Lucy was safe. But with her aunt in the room, I wouldn’t be able to speak openly. ‘I didn’t realize she had company. I’d really wanted to speak with her alone. If you’ll just pass along the message that I came, and have her come visit as soon as she can …’
‘Juliet!’ Lucy’s face appeared behind Clara, and she jerked the door open wider. Her frown accused me just as much as the finger pointing at my chest. ‘You’re not leaving without saying hello, are you?’
Her face was so warm and full of life, after those in the basement. ‘If you’ve already got company—’
‘Henry’s here for tea and Aunt Edith is chaperoning. And I’m in desperate need of you, you horrid friend. After you left me alone with John, I practically had to fend him off with an umbrella to keep him from kissing me.’
‘I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll chat then.’
Lucy folded her arms across her chest. ‘I’ve told Henry so much about you that he must believe you’re an imaginary friend I invented out of boredom. The least you could do is have a cup of tea with the poor man.’
At the end of the alley a carriage rumbled by in the direction of Covent Garden. I should be headed there now, to get the latest gossip from Joyce about the murders and see what else I could find out about Scotland Yard’s investigation. But Lucy was narrowing her eyes at me, and I said, ‘All right. Though I can’t stay but a few minutes.’
‘We’ll see about that. And Clara, I came to tell you I’ve eaten all the gingerbread cakes and we need more.’
Lucy linked her arm in mine as she dragged me up the main staircase to the parlor. ‘Thank god the holidays will be over soon, else I’d put on a stone in weight. Oh, I’m so glad you arrived! Henry’s been boring my ears off and I’m desperate for some real conversation. At least he’s nice to look upon.’ She caught herself, and quickly added, ‘Though only in a certain light. Otherwise he’s an ogre.’
We reached the top of the stairs and I tried to brush my hair back and make myself look presentable, when all I could think about was a boy back from the dead.
We entered the parlor, a small but opulent room with a cheerful fire crackling in the ornate fireplace and tea service set out on the low table between the upholstered chairs. Lucy’s aunt, a rather stiff-lipped, dried-out woman, turned when we entered, eyebrows raised at my sudden appearance. Henry was sitting on the sofa with his back to us.
Lucy brushed an errant curl back. ‘Aunt Edith, Henry, I’d like to introduce you to a dear friend. This is Juliet Moreau.’
I dimly heard my name, but for some reason she sounded far away. Henry had turned at the sound of her voice and was staring at us. At me. Suddenly the room felt too small, as though the furniture was pressing in and the fire consuming all the oxygen. He stood slowly to greet us. I was vaguely aware of Lucy’s aunt standing as well, her mouth moving and sound coming out, but she was no more real than a dress shop mannequin. Everything seemed equally unreal, just vague suggestions of furniture and people.
Everything, that was, except for the young man whose gold-flecked eyes met mine.
‘Juliet,’ Lucy said, ‘may I introduce Mr Henry Jakyll.’
He stepped forward to shake my hand.
The faded scar on his right cheek. The face that was so achingly familiar.
The hand extended to me belonged to Edward Prince.
9
The fire stopped crackling. The steam froze in the air. Everything had drifted into a far-off place, shifting into a colorless world like a fading photograph.
Everything but Edward.
Jakyll, I thought. Another false name, just like the other name he’d created – Edward Prince, or rather Prince Edward, a name borrowed from the pages of Shakespeare. Edward didn’t have a given name since he’d never truly been born, but made in a laboratory out of a handful of animal parts. Fox. Heron. Jackal. Of course – that was the source of his false name, a testament to his darker animal side.
The jackal side.
He had changed in the months since I’d seen him. Though the scar under his left eye still marred his face, his features had sharpened in a way that gave him a dramatic, brooding look. His eyes seemed a darker shade of brown – very nearly black – as did his hair. The most shocking change, however, was his size. Never a large young man, he now stood several inches above me and seemed to have put on a stone of muscle.
No wonder Lucy was so taken with him.
I gradually became aware that the room had gone silent and that Aunt Edith and Lucy stared at me expectantly. Edward’s outstretched hand, no longer skeletal but strong, powerful, hiding six-inch-long claws, awaited my own.
I had to make a choice. I could scream. I could tell Lucy and her aunt everything, accuse Edward of being the Wolf of Whitechapel, throw the boiling tea in his face to blind him, and run him through with the poker.
But the hand extended to me wasn’t that of a monster. Edward was split into two selves that shared the same body: one a sharp-clawed monster, the other a tortured young man who wanted nothing more than to be free from his curse. I thought of the little white flower tinged with blood I’d pressed into my journal. A gift from this young man before me, who had once loved me madly.
Well, whatever Edward had felt, it didn’t matter. Everything had changed when I walked into this parlor to discover Edward had involved Lucy in this. He might not intend to harm her, but the Beast could have other plans.
Edward’s throat constricted as he swallowed. I wondered, fleetingly, if he was as thrown off balance by seeing me as I was seeing him.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Jakyll,’ I said at last.
Lucy flopped onto the sofa and reached for her tea. Aunt Edith might have greeted me; I wasn’t sure. If she had, it had been brief and normal, just as though today was any other day and this was any other tea. But it wasn’t any other day. And this wasn’t any young man.
Clara bustled in with a tray of gingerbread cakes. ‘Pardon me, miss,’ she said with a grin, shuffling around me.
I slowly sank onto the sofa next to Lucy, feeling it first with my hands to make sure I wouldn’t miss the seat. Edward sat directly across from me in a dark green velvet chair. My head couldn’t reconcile his presence with Clara’s smile, Lucy’s carefree posture, the sunlight pouring in from the window.
None of them knew they were having tea with the Wolf of Whitechapel.
‘Juliet’s traveled the world as well,’ Lucy said to Edward, throwing her arm casually on the sofa back. ‘Henry’s been all over, knows about practically every country in the world, but you’ll have to forgive him if his customs are strange. He’s from Finland, you know.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Finland.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t bear it,’ Aunt Edith said, brushing a crumb off her dress. ‘All that cold year-round.’
I stared at them as though they spoke a foreign language. Lucy reached for another gingerbread cake and Aunt Edith made a disapproving cough in her throat.
My eyes trailed back to Edward. The last time I’d seen him, blood was pooling beneath his head into fresh straw. Why had I stopped Montgomery from slicing his throat? I wasn’t sure, but it might have had something to do with the look on his face now, somehow innocent despite all his hands had done.
‘I’ve heard quite a bit about you, Henry,’ I said.
The accusation was heavy in my voice, and though the ladies didn’t seem to notice it, Edward did. His eyes searched mine, pleading for forgiveness. How could I forgive him for placing Lucy in danger? For making me care about him when everything had been a lie? For murder?
Edward stood and began to pace as though he needed to stretch his legs, but I recognized that nervous agitation. The Beast was there, lurking just below the surface. ‘Yes, I wondered when we might meet each other,’ he said quietly. ‘From what Lucy has said, we seem to have some interests in common.’
Lucy clapped her hands. ‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you! Henry was interested in something about chemistry … that was it, wasn’t it? I told him you were much better at science than any boy I know.’
Edward’s haunted eyes stayed on me. They said everything his voice couldn’t. He hated his dark other half – the Beast – and the terrible things it led him to do. Even now, his eyes pleaded with me for help.
I couldn’t bear this, having tea with a murderer. All I could think about was the bodies in the morgue. Four people no longer breathed because of him. He’d killed people I cared about, like Alice. Innocent people. And yet, wasn’t I as good as a murderer myself? Father might still be alive if I hadn’t opened that door to his laboratory for Jaguar.
I clutched the sofa’s arm, rubbing my thumb against the rough upholstery seam to stay connected to the present.
Outside, the sun was past its zenith.
‘I should go,’ I choked. Lucy and her aunt looked at me, surprised. ‘I didn’t tell the professor when I’d be home.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Lucy said. ‘You’re not running off without even touching your tea. If the professor is in need of you, I’m certain this is the first place he’ll look. Oh my, Juliet, do you feel all right? You’ve gone pale.’
Aunt Edith said something droll about her own constitution and Lucy answered back smartly, and they started arguing again.
‘Drink some tea, Miss Moreau,’ Edward said quietly. ‘You’ll soon feel better.’
I tried to pick up the delicate cup, but it was like my hands were paws, my fingers too thick. It trembled so badly, I had to set it down.
Edward leaned on the back of the chair opposite me, his dark hair falling over his forehead. ‘Have you seen the hedge maze in the garden, Miss Moreau? There’s a wonderful view from the window.’ His eyes flickered toward the sun-drenched windowpanes. It was a good ten paces from where Lucy and her aunt argued – well out of earshot. He wanted to speak in private. When I hesitated, he leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Please, Juliet.’
There was such tightly controlled desperation in his words that I set down my tea and glanced at Lucy. They were talking of the grand Christmas tree that would soon be delivered in preparation for the masquerade. I stood and walked to the window with unsteady steps, Edward right behind me. It was a beautiful winter’s day outside, the hedges evergreen, not a cloud in the sky.
I kept my voice at a whisper. ‘If you dare to hurt Lucy—’
‘I won’t,’ he said quickly, matching my hushed tone. ‘I would never hurt her. I have some measure of control over—’
‘Henry!’ Lucy called behind us. ‘Henry, come tell Aunt Edith how we met that day in the rain. She wants to hear, and you know I’ve no patience for storytelling.’
His smile to her was artificial, though not unkind. ‘One moment, darling.’
When his eyes returned to mine, the false smile had vanished. ‘I swear to you I mean Lucy no harm. I wouldn’t ever let myself be around her if I thought the Beast might get free. I have a small measure of control over him; not enough to prevent the transformations, nor the crimes he commits, but I can delay them.’
I studied the deep crease in his forehead. I’d spent weeks with Edward at sea and on Father’s island, ignorant of his darker nature, and he had never hurt me, always managing to curb his other half’s cravings until he could release the Beast on some other poor victim. Perhaps he did have some measure of control over his transformations, but all I could picture was the cadaver room full of bodies.
‘How did you escape the island? I thought you were dead.’
‘The Beast is stronger than you think.’ His eyes were hooded, his body tense. ‘I’m trying to cure myself. I’m close.’
Here was the Edward I knew, the young man whose eyes were like a mirror to my own. ‘What kind of cure?’ I whispered, rubbing my own knuckles, which were already beginning to ache.
‘I just need to identify one missing ingredient in the serum. I need a little more time.’
‘You should have come to me sooner.’
‘I didn’t dare involve you. I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid direct contact with you, afraid the Beast might learn some information he could use later to harm you. I’ve settled for slips of news from Lucy. She cares about you a great deal. She speaks of you often.’ His throat tightened. ‘It didn’t mean that I didn’t want to see you. In fact, I wanted to see you quite badly.’
The look in his eyes gave me pause. Nothing of the Beast’s glowing yellow eyes lurked there now, though what I saw frightened me nearly as much.
Desire.
I looked away, wishing my cheeks weren’t turning warm. It seemed Edward’s infatuation with me hadn’t lessened with the passing months.
‘Meet me somewhere,’ I said, quick and low. ‘You must tell me what is going on.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t dare. Not until I’m cured.’
‘I don’t care what you want! People are dying, Edward.’ I darted a glance at Lucy and dropped my voice lower. ‘And we both know exactly who is responsible. I’m already involved, don’t you see? I was involved since the day the sailors pulled you out of the ocean and onto the Curitiba. You must agree to meet me and tell me everything. If you don’t, I’ll expose you. Lucy’s other suitor is the detective leading the investigation of the Wolf of Whitechapel. I can have him here in minutes.’
My heart pounded. I knew, on some deep level, that it was madness even to be talking to Edward. I also knew that, madness or not, Edward’s and my fates were tied together. I was the one threatening to expose him now, but our roles could so easily be reversed.
He took out his gold pocket watch and flipped it open and shut in indecision. At last he closed it and said, ‘Where?’
We needed someplace public enough so that I would be safe alone with him, yet private enough to speak intimately. My mind went back to the island, he and I behind the waterfall, sharing secrets and even a stolen kiss.
‘The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kensington,’ I whispered. ‘The greenhouse. We’ll each leave separately and meet there within an hour.’
He nodded.
The grandfather clock in the study chimed. Aunt Edith stood up and brushed the crumbs off her skirt, missing half of them. ‘Two o’clock already. I’ve got a dinner tonight at the club I must get ready for. Henry, dear, it’s been a pleasure. Won’t you walk me out?’
Edward’s eyes met mine. We were accomplices in this lie now, for better or worse. ‘I’ll be saying good-bye then, Lucy. It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Moreau.’
I hesitated a breath, just long enough to remember his false name.
‘And you, Mr Jakyll.’
10
The parlor door remained open behind them, leaving only the sound of the ticking hallway clock. Henry Jakyll. Edward Prince. One and the same.
‘I’m glad she’s left,’ Lucy said, coming to stand next to me at the window. ‘I think Aunt Edith only ever comes to tea to chastise me for all the things I’ve done wrong.’ She hunted in the fruit bowl on the side table and selected a grape. ‘What did you think of Henry?’ she asked slyly, popping the grape into her mouth. ‘He’s just awful, isn’t he? Didn’t I tell you?’
‘Yes, awful,’ I said carefully, glancing out the window to try to catch a glimpse of him as he left. ‘Not your type at all. Inspector Newcastle is more attractive anyway, don’t you think?’
She frowned, but at that moment I glimpsed Edward and Lucy’s aunt stepping out of the house below, where he helped her into a cabriolet and then started down the street at a fast pace, heading to the botanical gardens for our rendezvous. I looked at the sky, where the sun was already casting shadows. Maybe two hours before sunset. Damn these short winter days. I’d certainly not be able to meet Edward and still have time to rush back home for dinner at the professor’s. He’d be beside himself with worry when I didn’t show up.
Lucy plucked another grape, eyeing me strangely. She changed her mind and set it back down in the bowl. ‘The truth is, and I know this must sound absurd coming from me, but I actually think I might admire him. Not much, of course. Only a tiny bit. Perhaps it’s just stuffy in here.’
I shot her a look. I couldn’t imagine anything that chilled my blood more than the idea of Lucy enamored of a boy with a monstrous other half who had already killed four people in London – for me. I clutched her hand suddenly. ‘He seems a bore to me. I think you should forget him. Really. Now I must go, Lucy. I’m so sorry.’
Her eyes went wide. ‘You’ve only just arrived. I thought we might be able to talk, here, while we’re alone. Didn’t you want to speak to me privately?’ She leaned in, her voice dropping. ‘I have things to tell you, too. I’m not certain Papa’s been fair in his business dealings, and when I mentioned it to Mother, she didn’t seem to care.’
‘Blast, I’m sorry, I really can’t stay to hear about it right now. I’m a terrible friend, I know, but I really must go.’ I paused in the doorway. ‘Oh, and I forgot to tell you – Inspector Newcastle is going to propose. I thought you should know. And I really don’t think he’s that terrible; perhaps you should give him a chance.’
I squeezed her hand and hurried from the room and down the stairs, waving to Clara as I ran out into the street.
Guilt gripped me for leaving her so suddenly, but part of this was for Lucy. I could hardly explain that her suitor – who she actually fancied – had a murderous other side to him, and it was either cure him, kill him, or have her end up dead.
A chill was settling into the shadows of buildings as late afternoon approached. I turned toward the sun in the west, in the direction of the Royal Botanical Gardens, where palm trees stood like ghosts within the captive heat of the greenhouse.
A thousand places to kill. A million reasons not to trust.
I started running toward Kensington.
My feet ached by the time I arrived. The tired-looking ticket collector glanced at his pocket watch.
‘Palm House closes at sunset, the gardens at six. You have but a few hours.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said breathlessly, shoving my coins at him. I dashed through the gardens to the bridge that stretched across the frozen lake. From there, I could see the greenhouse, where rays of light caught on the thousands of glass panels.
I felt as though I’d crossed some invisible boundary and was no longer in London. Gone were the city crowds, the smoke and the soot, the noise of carriages and yelling street vendors.
I took a deep breath and pushed open the Palm House’s ironwork door. A flood of warmth escaped the crack, filling my lungs with steam as I entered the domed central atrium.
I slid out of my coat and left it hanging over a branch, then fumbled to open the top buttons of my dress. Sweat was already forming on my inner layers. Somewhere, the line between this world and another blurred.
I was back in the jungle.
The hiss of steam jets replaced the ocean tides. Machinery squealed like jungle birds. Steam filled my lungs with memories: Jaguar, with his flicking tail; the smell of burning refuse and unwashed animals in the islanders’ village; the salt in the breeze. In a strange way I missed the island terribly, heartsick for a place I’d hated and a father I’d wanted to die.
No – a father I’d helped murder.
‘Edward?’ I called as loud as I dared, uncertain if it was an enormous mistake to have come here.
A chain rattled overhead. Iron catwalks spanned the ceiling so visitors could walk among the treetops. A well-dressed figure now descended the spiral staircase. Edward. He stopped a few feet from me, as quiet as the steam at our feet.
‘Hello, Juliet.’
Being here, in this place so reminiscent of the island, I felt beastly things stir inside of me, taking me back to the island where we had learned to move through the trees quiet as animals, where he’d kissed me behind the waterfall. My pulse quickened, hungry for those things again despite my better sense.
He stepped forward, toying with his gold pocket watch, and I stepped back. ‘I told you, for the time being I’m still stronger than him. I can fight him if I feel him coming on. I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘What about that thief girl, and Annie, and the others? You were quick enough to kill them.’
‘I’m sorry for them, truly. When the Beast takes over, I lose myself to him.’
‘Why only kill people who have done wrong to me?’
A flicker of confusion passed over his features. ‘You’ll have to ask the Beast that question; he’s the one who chose them.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘He seems to know my memories, but I only share pieces of his. The next day I find newspaper headlines about three slashes to the chest, and I assume he was responsible. I knew the solicitor was an acquaintance of yours, but not the others. I had assumed they were random.’
‘Hardly. Each one of them committed a crime against me.’
Edward’s face softened. ‘That explains it, then. I hadn’t realized why he was so intent on those particular kills. He’s trying to protect you, in his own way.’
‘Protect me? Why?’
He regarded me strangely for the space of a few breaths, while I wondered if I was crazy to be here and not to try to kill him on sight. He said, ‘Because he’s as much in love with you as I am.’
My lips parted, though no words came. I paced over a path between soft spring-green ferns, trying to process everything. Emotions had never come easy to me, and they now threaded themselves in knots I couldn’t possibly unravel. ‘Killing is a choice. Can’t he just stop?’
‘You wouldn’t ask that question if you understood how powerful he is. He’d like to kill everyone who crosses his path, but he’s tried to restrain himself and, I suppose, kill only those who sought to harm you.’ He paused. ‘I try to keep him contained – look.’
His wiry fingers went to his shirt cuff. I couldn’t help but notice how his knuckles were swollen and knobby, so like my own when a bout of illness was coming on. He unbuttoned his cuff and rolled back his sleeve over his forearm, revealing dark bruises.
I gasped. The bruises ranged from dark blue to purple to a yellowing gray, a rainbow of pain. I could barely tear my eyes off their strange beauty when he reached for his shirt buttons. ‘I chain myself if I feel him coming out, but sometimes I’m not fast enough, or he breaks the lock.’ He opened his shirt to reveal his bare chest. Welts and bruises slashed his skin. I traced them with my eyes, entranced.
I swallowed. ‘Edward …’
He pulled his shirt back on and rolled down the sleeves. ‘I’m showing you because I want you to understand the lengths I’ll go to in order to cure myself. I don’t want to hurt anyone else, you least of all. I was as surprised as you were when you walked into Lucy’s parlor today. I knew you two were very close, but if I had known you were coming by, I’d never have gone.’
‘What are you doing with her?’ I asked. ‘You shouldn’t ever have introduced yourself to her. And now she’s practically ready to run away with you – what kind of madness is this?’
‘An act, nothing more,’ he said, taking an uncertain step toward me. ‘She’s a fine young woman, but I’m only posing as her suitor to get closer to her father. Juliet, I couldn’t ever love anyone besides—’
‘Stop,’ I said, throwing up a hand. ‘Please, Edward, don’t talk like that.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Why do you want to get close to Mr Radcliffe?’
He ran a hand through his hair. ‘It’s part of the plan to cure myself. I have letters that I took from your father’s laboratory before it burned. They contain correspondence with a former colleague of his, going back years to when he was first banished. All that time on the island, he maintained contact with someone, trading the secrets to his work in exchange for funding and supplies.’
His words gave me pause. All those years when I’d thought Father dead, he was corresponding with someone back in London? I sank against the rough bark of a palm tree to steady myself. I’d once asked Father why he never wrote to me. He’d alluded to the fact that there was a warrant on him, and letters would have alerted the police to his whereabouts. And yet it seemed he hadn’t hesitated to write to colleagues when it suited him.
I started to put everything together. ‘The letters were to Mr Radcliffe? Lucy’s father was his correspondent? But he isn’t a scientist. Their money came from rail, and now he’s doing something with the automobile industry, shipping engines all over Europe—’
Edward was quick to shake his head. ‘I don’t know for sure if it’s him. The letters aren’t signed; whoever his colleague was, Moreau wished to keep it secret. The correspondent called himself a King’s Man, nothing more. So I’ve been investigating all the members of the King’s Club, starting with those closest to your father, such as Radcliffe. He’s a hard man to get close to.’
‘The King’s Club is wrapped up in this?’ My mind ticked back to the grainy old photograph hanging in the hallways of King’s College. Father’s young face had seemed so hopeful then, brimming with ambition. I tried to remember the other faces. Hastings had been there, and Isambard Lessing … the rest of the names bled together in my head.
‘So you used Lucy. Never mind that you would only end up breaking her heart, assuming you didn’t first rip it out of her chest.’ I knew my words were laced with acid, but he didn’t flinch. ‘Did you at least discover anything about her father?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet. There are a dozen King’s Men who fit the profile.’ A shadow passed through the golden flecks in his eyes. ‘Including your guardian.’
My hand fell away from my collar. The professor? Words raced up my throat, ready to deny it, but they never made it to my lips. Doubts started to pull them back down – the professor had been in the photograph, standing right next to my father, of all places – but I gritted my teeth and ignored my doubts. ‘The professor was the one who turned Father in. He’d never support his work.’
But Edward didn’t answer, and my blood went cold. Only the day before yesterday the professor had told me about how he’d met Father in the King’s Club. He’d prodded me for information, asked me to talk about my time on the island. I thought he’d just been concerned …
I shook my head fiercely. ‘No, I don’t believe it. It’s someone else. But it doesn’t matter – whoever Father’s secret colleague is, you can’t contact him. It’s too dangerous.’
‘I haven’t a choice. If he knows Moreau’s work, he might know how to cure me.’
‘He’ll use you! On the island Montgomery and I swore we wouldn’t let any of my father’s research leave, in case the wrong people were to get ahold of it. That’s the entire reason I destroyed his laboratory, the reason I wouldn’t let Balthazar come back with me … the reason I helped kill my own father!’
My desperate words filled the artificial jungle around us, and I clenched my jaw as if I could take them back.
‘I’m flesh and blood, not a diagram in a laboratory notebook,’ Edward said. ‘How could they possibly use me?’
‘It wouldn’t be impossible for someone with the right training. I saw a hybridized Bourgogne lily the other day and knew exactly what stock it had come from. If I’d been able to dissect it and further examine its various parts, I’d be able to tell even more.’ My voice fell to a whisper. ‘They could do the same to you, Edward. Cut you open and see how Father made you, and then re-create it. Think of what that would mean. How many animals would die on their operating tables. Humans, too, probably. And in the end, an army of beast-men not contained on a single small island.’
His hand touched the scar under his eye absently and then fell away. ‘What other choice do I have? As long as the Beast is a part of me, he’ll keep killing. That blood is on my hands too, Juliet. I’ve no one else to help me.’
A thousand emotions warred in my chest. Some told me to run, some told me our goals were the same – finding a cure – and that we could help each other. Some told me to leave him to his fate. But it was my fate too, now. I’d had a hand in my own father’s murder to keep this from happening. And I wasn’t a fool. If Father’s colleague got his hands on Edward, it would only be a matter of time before he found out I, too, was one of Father’s experiments. If I wasn’t careful, it might be me strapped to an operating table one day.
I cursed under my breath, wondering if I was making a huge mistake.
‘Then I’ll help you myself.’
11
Later that evening, Edward and I stood on the landing of my lodging house in Shoreditch while I fumbled with the key. Sharkey had been waiting outside the front door, half-hidden in the bushes, having escaped Joyce again and come here, where he knew I’d give him whatever meat scraps I had left over from my experiments. I’d introduced the dog to Edward and he’d carried Sharkey up the stairs in his arms. Seeing him act so gentle with the little mutt stirred something inside me.
For months I’d thought Edward was dead, though that hadn’t kept my mind from straying back to him. Edward had been a friend, possibly even something more, before I’d learned the terrible truth about the monster inside him. I think I would have felt more outrage if he hadn’t died. But in death I had absolved him of his crimes, blaming my father instead for having created him, and I had absolved myself of blame, too, for not seeing through his lies earlier. But here he was, very much alive, responsible for a string of violent murders, and yet also very much just a boy learning what it meant to be human. Almost all he knew of the world he’d learned from books; the sights and smells of the city – even something as common as a street dog – must be a revelation to him.
I turned the lock and pushed open the door. This place was more than a workshop; it was my retreat from fine china and straight-backed chairs and weak tasteless tea. I liked coming here alone, where I could hide from the world, tucked under the patchwork quilt. I had worried that by bringing Edward here, that precious balance would be upset. But as I watched him rubbing Sharkey’s head and leaning against the rough wood of the stairwell, he seemed to fit so naturally.
‘Come inside,’ I said softly. ‘No one knows about this place. You’ll be well hidden here.’
It took a lot for me to say that – to invite a murderer into my one private space. But in a twist of fate, watching him shift the dog from one arm to the other and brush back a loose strand of hair, I felt strangely safe with him.
Safe with a murderer. With Edward. Perhaps this was how madness started.
Sharkey jumped out of his arms and curled up by the bricks around the woodstove. Edward came in hesitantly, scratching the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable in a lady’s room. I lit the lamp and nodded toward the woodstove. ‘Will you light the fire? I’ll put the kettle on.’
He bent to swing open the iron grate and add wood to the stove. While his back was turned, I chewed on a fingernail and tried not to steal glances at his frame, so much stronger than I’d remembered. Having him here triggered so many memories. A sun-scarred castaway on the Curitiba’s deck, clutching a crumpled photograph. A boy holding me close in a cave behind a waterfall. The one person in addition to me who wasn’t afraid to stand up to my father, when even Montgomery wouldn’t.
My left rib started to ache at the painful memories. Montgomery had the strength of a horse, and yet he’d been powerless in front of my father. I remembered being a little girl and listening through the laboratory keyhole as Father taught Montgomery how the circulatory system worked. It had hurt then, too, that Father was closer to a servant boy than to his own daughter. Perhaps I shouldn’t have blamed Montgomery. He’d had no other family; his father was a Dutch sailor he’d never known, his mother died when he was barely five, no siblings, no other servants his age. Of course he’d fallen under the spell of Father’s charms; any child that lonely would crave a connection wherever he could get it.
And yet I offered him love, I thought blackly. I chose him, but he didn’t choose me.
Edward closed the grate and rubbed his hands together in front of the fire with a boyish grin. I didn’t even consider trying to smile back. My heart was too shaken.
‘Where did you get those clothes?’ I asked. ‘They aren’t cheap, and neither is that gold pocket watch.’
He came to the cabinet, where the lantern tossed pools of light over his face. ‘The Beast keeps a room at a brothel in Soho – I wake there sometimes. He steals clothes and things from the wealthy patrons, always finds men close to my size … very thoughtful of the Beast.’ The hints of a smile played on his mouth.
‘This isn’t a joking matter.’
He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t mean to make light of it. I’ve been staying in the Beast’s room and selling the stolen goods. I know it’s hardly proper, but a brothel’s good cover – I don’t know where else to go. People tend to overlook the screaming when I transform …’
I shuddered at the thought. ‘You can’t go back there,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later one of the patrons will report the thefts, and if Scotland Yard comes to investigate and catches you, it’ll be all over the newspapers, and not long before Father’s mystery colleague gets his hands on you.’ I nodded toward the bed, looking away before my cheeks warmed. ‘You can stay here.’
He nodded, and silence fell around us. He took out his pocket watch, toying with it just to fill the quiet. He wandered to the worktable, where I’d left the laboratory equipment in perfect order, the boiler and beakers and glass vials arranged in descending order of height. It wasn’t a vial he reached for, though, but one of the grafted rosebushes. I’d bound a single white rose to a bush of red, and he touched it as gently as a caress.
‘You made these?’
I didn’t answer, afraid he’d point out how similar the grafting and splicing was to Father’s work, and how the placement of my laboratory equipment mirrored Father’s exactly.
‘Yes,’ I said at last.
‘They’re beautiful.’
A surge of pride swelled in my heart. The kettle started whistling, and I nearly tripped over the dog to fetch it, along with my single mug. I poured a cup and handed it to him, trying not to think about his compliment. ‘I’m not used to guests here. I’ve only the one cup.’
‘Much obliged,’ he said, taking the tea, and only then acknowledged the medical equipment. ‘And all of this?’
‘I have to have it,’ I said quickly. ‘The serum I take is failing. Father designed it for me when I was a baby, and as I get older, it’s less effective. I’m trying to cure myself, just like you are.’ I let my hand fall over a crystal beaker. ‘That’s why I offered to help you.’
‘Have you had any success?’
‘Not yet,’ I said, though my voice caught as my eyes fell on the cupboard shelf. A book glowed there in the faint lantern light. It was one of many books I kept on anatomy, and botany, and philosophy, but this one was special. It stood out like a temptation, or maybe an accusation.
It was my father’s journal.
I’d found it the day after Montgomery set me adrift from the island. He must have stowed it in the dinghy along with the water and food and other supplies. For a while, I had resisted opening it. And yet once I discovered that Father’s serum was failing me, the temptation to look had been too strong. I had opened that leather cover and read his notes – some scrawled, most in his painstakingly precise handwriting. I’d flipped through the pages, desperate for some clues about how to cure myself. And yet the journal hadn’t proven anything, half of it little more than lines of nonsense words and numbers strung together.
I touched the journal delicately, but didn’t dare pull it out. ‘Father made most of his notations in here, before he transferred everything to the files he kept in his laboratory. There’s a formula for my serum, and the one he used on the islanders, and I’ve been trying to adapt it to my current situation.’ I let my hand fall away from the book. ‘No luck so far. Much of what he says in there is nonsense, anyway. He must have used a personal shorthand when he was writing in a hurry, and I haven’t been able to make sense of it.’
Edward’s eyes didn’t leave the journal. When he spoke, his voice held a quiet sort of hope. ‘Does it say anything about me? He used cellular traits from human blood to make me. I never found out whose blood it was.’
His fingers were still flipping the pocket watch over nervously, and I understood. To Edward it wasn’t just blood in a test tube. That human blood was his only tie to another person – to a family, in a sense.
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t say. I’m sorry.’
He turned to the chemistry set, looking through my beakers and vials of supplies. Science, math, literature – these were the things Edward was comfortable with, things easily learned from a book. He made a good show at social interaction, using lines and scenes from obscure plays no one knew, but I didn’t think it ever came naturally to him.
‘We can figure it out together,’ I said softly. ‘We’ll cure both of us. It’ll just take time.’
‘Time is something I don’t have much of, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The longer I’m with the Beast, the more alike we become. I can feel him bleeding into me, trying to take over. I can still delay the transformations, but I’m not sure for how much longer. He could only hold his form minutes at first, a half hour at most. Now he can hold it for two hours.’ His eyes met mine over the flickering burner flame, and again I thought about how much darker they looked. ‘In another month, maybe less, I’m afraid he’ll take over completely.’
My lips parted. This was why he seemed bigger to me, and darker, and stronger. The Beast was melding with him. ‘Edward …’
‘I can’t let it get to that, Juliet. He’ll terrorize everything. If he would let me take my own life, I would. I’ve tried a dozen times, but he prevents me.’ He paused. ‘Montgomery nearly killed me, once.’ He looked away from the flame. ‘You shouldn’t have stopped him.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I whispered.
His flickering eyes found mine. ‘You know it’s the only possible end for me. I was never meant to exist.’
‘But you do exist, Edward. We’ll find the missing ingredient, and we’ll get rid of the Beast.’ I realized how desperate my voice sounded. Desperate for him, or desperate for me, now that I had someone in my life who shared my secrets?
‘Juliet …,’ he muttered, and brushed the back of his hand against my cheek.
Warmth bloomed where he touched me. For an instant I leaned into it, as starved for human contact as he was, and wicked temptations whispered in my head before I could twist away in shock at my own response. I was lonely, that was all, especially for someone I could talk to freely.
He killed Alice, I reminded myself, thinking of my father’s sweet young maid. He could kill you, if you get too close.
‘How did you survive the fire?’ I asked, as though we could pretend that touch had never happened.
‘The Beast is strong. He heals fast. I came to and was able to crawl out before the barn collapsed, and then I salvaged what I could from the house. The letters, for one.’
‘I want to see these letters.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll go back to the brothel and collect them. I must return anyway for the chains I use to bind myself and some changes of clothes.’
I chewed on a fingernail, pacing. ‘I want to help you, Edward, truly, but not if …’ I swallowed, thinking of those drained bodies. ‘Not if you keep killing people.’
‘I’ll fetch the chains in the morning. He’s weaker early in the day. If he has the choice, he prefers to emerge at nighttime.’
‘And tonight? Can you promise me no one else will die tonight?’
A flash of Annie Benton’s face, Sir Danvers Carew, the red-haired thief girl.
Edward went to my worktable and searched through the vials, coming back with a heavy dose of sedative. ‘Give me this, then,’ he said.
‘That much could kill you.’
‘You underestimate how strong I’ve gotten. It’s only for one night. Tomorrow I’ll have the chains.’ He held it out to me, and I took it hesitantly. I’d gotten it from a veterinarian who had told me it was used to sedate animals for transportation. If it would stop a lion, it would stop Edward.
‘Give me your arm,’ I said. ‘You’ll fall asleep in ten minutes, twenty at most.’ He held it out to me and I inserted the needle into a vein, telling myself there was no choice, that I was doing this so we wouldn’t wake up to any more bloody headlines in the newspaper. I rolled his sleeve back down gently. ‘One more thing. Promise me you won’t see Lucy again. You’re putting her in danger by being around her.’
He nodded a little hesitantly. ‘I’ll send her a note.’
I felt the weight of the unfinished conversation and finally asked the question that kept circling in my thoughts.
‘What happened to Montgomery?’
There was the pain again, sharp and quick, in my side, as though when Montgomery had shoved the dinghy away with his boot, he’d kicked my heart instead. I recapped the syringe, biting the inside of my cheek.
Edward didn’t respond right away, and my mind filled with answers he wasn’t saying. Perhaps he’d killed Montgomery, or one of the beast-men had. Or Montgomery was still there, on the island, content never to see me again.
‘He’s alive,’ Edward said at last, but I could tell he was holding something back. ‘He hunted me for weeks on the island. I left him notes, trying to get him to give me a chance to explain … I thought maybe he could help me find a cure. But he was only interested in hunting me down, and I knew sooner or later he’d have his chance, and he wouldn’t win. The Beast is too strong. So I left, to come here and find a cure before my other half killed him.’
I toyed with one of the silver forks in the pile of stolen silverware, watching the glints from the lantern. He stepped closer, dropping his voice. ‘Forget him, Juliet. He abandoned you. He was keeping secrets from you.’
I glanced up from the fork. ‘Secrets?’
‘That he was helping your father, that he’d made some of the creatures himself, and worst of all …’ He stopped and looked away.
‘What secret?’ I asked. When he didn’t answer, I let the fork clatter to the floor and grabbed his suit lapel a little roughly. ‘What other secret was Montgomery keeping from me, Edward?’
‘It doesn’t matter. You loved him, and he left you. I’d never do that to you. I’d sooner cut off my own hand than do anything to cause you pain.’ My fingers were still coiled in the stiff fabric of his lapel, and he whispered, ‘If you’d only give me a chance …’
But I stepped back toward the cabinet, away from his promises and his offers. My breath was coming fast. The world was an upside-down place when Montgomery James was keeping secrets from me and Edward Prince telling me the truth.
But Edward was right – Montgomery had lied to me. He had left me.
I grabbed my coat before he could say another word, and said, ‘The professor will have half the city out looking for me. It’s so late … I must get back. I’ll leave Sharkey here with you; the drugs will put you to sleep in a few minutes, so lock the door behind me. If you aren’t too groggy tomorrow, go through Father’s journal – maybe you can make sense of it. I’ll come back tomorrow night with fresh supplies.’ I squeezed the doorknob, afraid to let go. Terrified to leave him, terrified that I still might read of fresh murders tomorrow in the newspaper. Sedatives might not be enough. Chains might not be enough. I had seen what the Beast could do. I’d have to make something even stronger to contain him until we could find the cure.
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Megan Shepherd
Inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this tantalizing sequel to Megan Shepherd's gothic suspense novel, The Madman's Daughter, explores the hidden natures of those we love and how far we'll go to save them from themselves.To defeat the darkness, she must first embrace it.Back in London after her trip to Dr. Moreau's horrific island, Juliet is rebuilding the life she once knew and trying to forget her father's legacy. But soon it's clear that someone – or something – hasn't forgotten her, as people close to Juliet start falling victim to a murderer who leaves a macabre calling card of three clawlike slashes. Has one of her father's creations also escaped the island?As Juliet strives to stop a killer while searching for a serum to cure her own worsening illness, she finds herself once more in a world of scandal and danger. Her heart torn in two, past bubbling to the surface, life threatened by an obsessive killer – Juliet will be lucky to escape alive.
MEGAN SHEPHERD
Her Dark Curiosity
To Peggy and Tim,
for a childhood filled with books & love
Table of Contents
Cover (#uf6ffd1dc-1fa8-5ac8-b629-323b97805b5e)
Title Page (#ua632d9e2-8296-56bb-b23a-6718376c9538)
Dedication (#ucf5db47c-cd63-5d25-bc68-df6d17bc7293)
Chapter 1 (#u3703a1dd-18f2-5b52-a945-d6f2279959aa)
Chapter 2 (#ufdebcf2e-5eb4-572e-9e1b-ee53db875946)
Chapter 3 (#u910773ce-d062-53f5-a781-5db4718ef082)
Chapter 4 (#uabb1d77c-00a0-542e-9ba4-033e428355d9)
Chapter 5 (#u7839c471-0fef-51ad-9bcb-668d4cab7db1)
Chapter 6 (#ud47856ba-501b-521b-8249-1cd71acd4e15)
Chapter 7 (#ucc08c142-ef09-5910-aeea-1b3c491d1949)
Chapter 8 (#u3d0711d8-815a-504e-8adc-2275fc5ba3e9)
Chapter 9 (#u06f73f44-1324-562a-8b6d-bba2356fa66f)
Chapter 10 (#u06672619-0706-57f5-acd2-8259061e99c2)
Chapter 11 (#ubdd2f232-0d9d-581d-b821-aa06e4fe0bdc)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Megan Shepherd (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1
The air in my crumbling attic chamber smelled of roses and formaldehyde.
Beyond the frosted windowpanes, the rooftops of Shoreditch stretched toward the east in sharp angles still marked with yesterday’s snow, as chimney stacks pumped smoke into an already foggy sky. On nights like these, I never knew what dangers might lurk in the streets. Yesterday morning a flower girl around my age was found frozen on the corner below. I hadn’t known her aside from glimpses in the street, one girl on her own nodding to another, but now her dark, pretty eyes would never again meet mine in the lamplight. The newspapers said nothing of her death – just one of dozens on such a cold night. I’d learned of it in slips and whispers when I made my usual rounds to the flower stalls and butcher stands. They told me she’d tried to stuff flowers between the layers of her meager clothing for warmth. The flowers had frozen too.
I pulled my patchwork quilt tighter around my shoulders, shivering at the thought. After all, a threadbare scrap of fabric wasn’t much more than crumpled flowers.
Winter in London could be a deadly time.
And yet, as I studied the street below where children trailed a chestnut roaster hoping for fallen nuts, I couldn’t help but feel there was something about the narrow streets that whispered of a certain familiarity, a sense of safety despite the rough neighborhood. The tavern owner across the street came out to hang a sparse holly wreath on her paint-flecked door, getting ready for Christmas in a few weeks. My thoughts drifted backward to memories of mincemeat pies and presents under a fir tree, but my smile soon faded, along with the fond remembrances. What good would presents do me now, when death might be just around the corner?
I returned to my worktable. The attic I let was small, a narrow bed and a cabinet missing a drawer arranged around an ancient woodstove that groaned into the night. My shabby worktable was divided in two halves; the right-hand side contained half a dozen twisted rosebushes in various states of being grafted. A flower shop in Covent Garden paid me to alter these bushes so that the same plant would produce both red and white flowers. The meager profit I made helped pay for the rent and the medical supplies on the left side of the table: a syringe from my previous day’s treatment, a package wrapped in butcher paper, and scrawled notes about the healing properties of hibiscus flowers.
I took my seat, letting the patchwork quilt pool onto the floor, and reached for one of the glass vials. Father had developed this serum for me when I’d been a baby, and until recently it had kept the worst of my symptoms at bay. Over the past few months, however, all that had begun to change, and I was growing more ill: muscle spasms, followed by a deep-seated ache in my joints, and a vertigo that left my vision dulled. The instant I touched the vial, my hand clenched with a sharp tremor, and the small container slid from my fingers and shattered on the floor.
‘Blast!’ I said, hugging my quaking hand to my chest. This was how the fits always began.
As flickering shadows from my lamp threw beastlike shapes on the roof, I cleaned the broken glass and then unwrapped the butcher’s package and smoothed down the edges. The smell of meat filled the air, ironlike, only just beginning to rot. My head started to spin from the odor. I lifted one of the pancreases. The organ was the size of my fist, a light fleshy color, shriveled into deep wrinkles. The cow must have been killed yesterday, maybe the day before.
Its death might mean my life. I’d been born with a spinal deformity that would have been fatal, if my father hadn’t been London’s most gifted surgeon. He’d corrected my spine, though the operation resulted in a scar down the length of my back and several missing organs that he’d been able to substitute in his desperation with those of a fawn. My body had never quite accepted the foreign tissue, resulting in the tremors, dizziness, and need for daily injections.
I wasn’t certain why the serum was failing now. Perhaps I was becoming immune, or the raw ingredients had altered, or perhaps now that I was growing from child to woman, my body’s composition was changing, too. I’d outgrown his serum just as I had my childish respect for him. His serum had only ever been temporary anyway, lasting a day or two at most. Now I was determined to create something even better: a permanent cure.
The pancreas’s puckered flesh yielded under my scalpel’s sharpened blade, separating like butter. It required but three simple incisions. One down the length. One to expose the glycogen sac. Another to slice the sac free and extract it.
I slid over the tray clinking with glass vials, along with the crushed herbs I’d already mixed with powders from the chemists’. This work had a way of absorbing me, and I scarcely realized how the afternoon was passing, or how cold the air seeping through the window was growing. At last I finished this latest batch of serum and waited impatiently to see if the various ingredients would hold. In order to be effective, the disparate parts would need to maintain cohesion for at least a full minute. I waited, and yet after only ten seconds the serum split apart like a bloated eel left too long in the sun.
Blast.
It had failed, just like all the times before.
Frustrated, I pushed my chair back and paced in front of the twisted rosebushes. How much longer could I go on like this, getting worse, without a cure? A few more months? Weeks? A log cracked in the woodstove, sending hot light licking at the stove’s iron door. The flames flickered like those of another fire long ago, my last night on the island. I had been desperate then, too.
Montgomery stood on the dock, the laboratory where he’d helped Father with his gruesome work blazing behind him. Waves lapped at the dinghy I crouched in, waiting for him to join me. We’d sail to London, put the island behind us, start a new life together. And yet Montgomery remained on the dock, let go of the rope, and pushed me out to sea.
But we belong together, I had said.
I belong with the island, he’d replied.
A church bell rang outside, six chimes, and a glance at the window told me night had settled quickly. I was late again, reliving memories I’d sooner forget. I grabbed my coat and threw open the door, dashing down four rickety flights of stairs until I was outside with the wind pushing at my face and the cold night open before me.
I stuck to the well-traveled, gaslit thoroughfares. It wasn’t the fastest route to Highbury, but I didn’t dare take the shortcuts through the alleyways. Men lurked there, men so much larger than a slip of a girl.
I turned north on Chancery Lane, which was busy at all hours with people loitering between pubs, and I hugged my coat tighter, keeping my eyes low and my hood pulled high. Even so, I got plenty of stares. Not many young ladies went out alone after dark.
In such chaos, London felt much like Father’s island. The beasts that lurked here just had less fur and walked more upright. The towering buildings seemed taller each day, as though they’d taken root in the oil and muck beneath the street’s surface. The noise and the smoke and the thousand different smells felt suffocating. Too closely packed. Ragged little children reached out like thorny vines. It felt as if eyes were always watching, and they were – from upstairs windows, from dark alleys, from beneath the low brims of wool caps hiding all manner of dark thoughts.
As soon as I could, I escaped the crowd onto a street that took me to the north section of Highbury. From there it wasn’t too far to Dumbarton Street, where the lanes were wide and paved with granite blocks, swept clean of all the refuse found in the lesser neighborhoods. The houses grew from stately to palatial as my boots echoed on the sidewalk. Twelve-foot-high Christmas trees studded with tiny candles shone behind tall windows, and heavy fir garlands framed every doorway.
I paused to lift the latch of the low iron gate surrounding the last house on the corner. The townhouse was three stories of limestone facade with a sloping mansard roof that gave it a stately air, as though it had quietly withstood regime changes and plague outbreaks without blinking an eye. It was on the quiet end of Dumbarton, not the grandest house by far, despite the fact that its owner was one of London’s wealthiest academics. I dusted off my coat and ran my fingers through my hair before ringing the doorbell.
The door was opened by an old man dressed in a three-piece black suit who might look stern if not for the deep wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, which betrayed his inclination to smile in a charmingly crooked way – a habit he gave in to now.
‘Juliet,’ he said, ‘I was starting to worry. How was your visit with Lucy?’
I smiled, the only way I knew to hide my guilt, and pulled off my gloves. ‘You know Lucy, she could chatter away for hours. Sorry I’m a bit late.’ I kissed his cheek as if that would make up for the lie, and he kindly helped me out of my coat.
‘Welcome home, my dear,’ he said.
2
Professor Victor von Stein had been a colleague of my father’s – and the man who turned him in to the police ten years ago for crimes of ethical transgression. The professor’s betrayal of their friendship might have bothered me when I was younger and still had respect for my father, but now I thought he’d done the world – and me – a favor. I owed him even more because, for the last six months, he’d been my legal guardian.
When I’d left Father’s island, I’d followed Montgomery’s instructions to find a Polynesian shipping lane and, after nearly three scorched weeks in the dinghy, was picked up by traders bound for Cape Town. From there, the expensive trinkets Montgomery had packed bought me passage to Dakar, and on to Lisbon. I’d gotten sick on the last leg of the voyage, and by the time I reached London was little more than a skeleton, raving about monsters and madmen. I must have said my friend Lucy’s name, because one of the nurses had summoned her, and she’d taken care of me, but my good fortune ended there. One of the doctors was an old acquaintance from King’s College by the name of Hastings. A year ago he’d tried to have his way with me and I’d slit his wrist. As soon as he learned I’d returned, he’d had me thrown in jail, which was where Professor von Stein had found me.
Lucy Radcliffe told me your circumstances, he had said. Is it true what you did to this doctor?
He needn’t have asked. The scar at the base of Dr Hasting’s wrist matched my old mortar scraper exactly.
It is, I’d said, but I had no choice. I’d do it again.
The professor had studied me closely with the observant eyes of a scientist, and then demanded I be released into his custody and the charges dropped. Hastings didn’t dare argue against someone so highly respected. The next day, I went from a dirty prison cell to a lady’s bedroom with silk sheets and a roaring fire.
Why are you doing this? I had asked him.
Because I failed to stop your father until it was too late, he’d replied. It isn’t too late for you, Miss Moreau, not yet.
Now, sitting at the formal dining table with a forest of polished silver candlesticks between us, I secretly kicked off my slippers and curled my toes in the thick Oriental rug, glad to put that old life behind me.
‘An invitation arrived today,’ the professor said from his place opposite me. The hint of an accent betrayed that he’d grown up in Scotland, though his family’s Germanic ancestry was evident in his fair hair and deep-set eyes. A fire crackled in the hearth behind him, not quite warm enough to chase the cold that snuck through the cracks in the dining room windows.
‘It’s for a holiday masquerade at the Radcliffes’,’ he continued, removing a pair of thin wire-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, along with the invitation. ‘It’s set for two weeks from today. Mr Radcliffe included a personal note saying how much Lucy would like you there.’
‘I find that rather ironic,’ I said, buttering my roll with the hint of a smile, ‘since last year the man would have thrown me into the streets if I’d dared set foot in his house. He’s changed his tune now that I’m under your roof. I think it’s you he’s trying to win over, Professor.’
The professor chuckled. Like me, he was a person of simple tastes. He wanted only a comfortable home with a warm fire on a winter night, a cook who could prepare a decent coq au vin, and a library full of words he could surround himself with in his old age. I was quite certain the last thing he wanted was a seventeen-year-old girl who slunk around and jumped at shadows, but he never once showed me anything but kindness.
‘I fear you’re right,’ he said. ‘Radcliffe has been trying to ingratiate himself with me for months, badgering me to join the King’s Club. He says they’re investing in the horseless carriage now, of all things. He’s a railroad man, you know, probably making a fortune shipping all those automobile parts to the coast and arranging transport from there to the Continent.’ He let out a wheezing snort. ‘Greedy old blowhards, the lot of them.’
The cuckoo clock chimed in the hallway, making me jump. The professor’s house was filled with old heirlooms: china dinner plates, watery portraits of stiff-backed lords and ladies whose nameplates had been lost to time, and that blasted clock that went off at all hours.
‘The King’s Club?’ I asked. ‘I’ve seen their crest in the hallways at King’s College.’
‘Aye,’ he said, buttering his bread with a certain ferocity. ‘An association of university academics and other professionals in London. It’s been around for generations, claiming to contribute to charitable organizations – there’s an orphanage somewhere they fund.’ He finished buttering his roll and took a healthy bite, closing his eyes to savor the taste. He swallowed it down with a sip of sherry.
‘I was a member long ago, when I was young and foolish,’ he continued. ‘That’s where I met your father. We soon found it nothing more than an excuse for aging old men to sit around posturing about politics and getting drunk on gin, and neither of us ever went back. Radcliffe’s a fool if he thinks they can woo me again.’
I smiled quietly. Sometimes, I was surprised the professor and I weren’t related by blood, because we seemed to share what I considered a healthy distrust of other people’s motives.
‘What do you say?’ he asked. ‘Would you like to make an appearance at the masquerade?’ He gave that slightly crooked smile again.
‘If you like.’ I shifted again as the lace lining of my underskirt itched my bare legs like the devil. I’d never understand why the rich insisted on being so damned uncomfortable all the time.
‘Good heavens, no. I haven’t danced in twenty years. But Elizabeth should arrive by then, unless there’s more snow on the road from Inverness, and I’ve no doubt we shall be able to wrangle her into a ball gown. She used to be quite the elegant dancer, as I recall.’
The professor stowed his glasses in his vest pocket. Elizabeth was his niece, an educated woman in her mid-thirties who lived on their family estate in northern Scotland and served the surrounding rural area as a doctor – an occupation a woman would only be permitted to do in such a remote locale. I’d met her as a child, when she was barely older than I was now, and I remember beautiful blond hair that drove men wild, but a shrewdness that left them uneasy.
‘You know how the holidays are,’ he continued, ‘all these invitations to teas and concerts. I’d be a sorry escort for you.’
‘I very much doubt that, Professor.’
While he went on talking about Elizabeth’s Christmas visit, I dug my fork beneath my dress and scratched my skin beneath the itchy fabric. It was a tiny bit of relief, and I tried to work it under my corset, when the professor cocked his head.
‘Is something the matter?’
Guiltily, I slid the fork into my lap and sat straighter. ‘No, sir.’
‘You seem uncomfortable.’
I looked into my lap, ashamed. He’d been so kind to take me in, the least I could do was try to be a proper lady. It surely wasn’t right that I felt more comfortable wrapped in a threadbare quilt in my attic workshop than in his grand townhouse. The professor didn’t know about the attic, and only knew a very limited account of what had happened to me over the past year. I had told him that the previous autumn I’d stumbled upon my family’s former servant, Montgomery, who had told me that my father was alive and living in banishment on an island, to which he took me. I’d lied to the professor and said Father was ill and passed away from tuberculosis. I had claimed that the disease had decimated the island’s native population and I’d fled, eventually making my way back to London.
I had said nothing of Father’s beast-men. Nothing of Father’s continued experimentation. Nothing of how I’d fallen in love with Montgomery and thought my affections returned, until he’d betrayed me. Nothing of Edward Prince, either, the castaway I’d befriended, only to learn he was Father’s most successful experiment, a young man created from a handful of animal parts chemically transmuted using human blood. A boy who had loved me despite the secret he kept carefully hidden, that a darker half – a Beast – lived within his skin and took control of his body at times, murdering the other beast-men who had once been such gentle souls. Edward was dead now, his body consumed in the same fire that had taken my father. That didn’t mean, however, that I’d ever managed to forget him.
By the time I looked up, I found the professor’s attention had strayed to his newspaper. I returned to my baked hen, stabbing it with my fork. Why hadn’t I seen Edward’s secret? Why had I been so naïve? My thoughts drifted to the past until the professor let out a little exclamation of surprise at something he read.
‘Good lord, there’s been a murder.’
My fork hovered over my plate. ‘It must have been someone important if it’s reported on the front page.’
‘Indeed, and unfortunately, I knew the man. A Mr Daniel Penderwick, solicitor for Queensbridge Bank.’
The name sounded vaguely familiar. ‘Not a friend of yours, I hope.’
The professor seemed absorbed by the article. ‘A friend? No, I’d hardly call him a friend. Only an acquaintance, and a black one at that, though I’d never wish anything so terrible upon the man as murder. He was the bank solicitor who took away your family’s fortune all those years ago. Made a career of that dismal work.’
Uneasiness stirred at the mention of those darker times. ‘Have they caught his murderer?’
‘No. It says here they’ve no suspects at all. He was found dead from knife wounds in Whitechapel, and the only clue is a flower left behind.’ He gave me a concerned glance above his spectacles, then folded the paper and tossed it to the side table. ‘Murder is hardly proper dinner conversation. Forgive me for mentioning it.’
I swallowed, still toying with the fork. The professor was always worried that whenever an unpleasant topic of conversation arose, I’d think of my father and be plagued by nightmares. He needn’t have worried. They plagued me regardless.
After all, I had helped kill Father.
When I looked up, the professor was studying me, the laugh lines around his eyes turned down for once. ‘If you ever need to discuss what happened while you were gone …’ He shifted, nearly as uncomfortable with such conversations as I. ‘I knew your father well. If you need to resolve your feelings for him …’ He sighed and rubbed his wrinkles.
I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated his efforts, but that he would never understand what had happened to me. No one would. I remembered it as if it had happened only moments ago. Father’s laboratory burning, him locked inside, the blood-red paint bubbling on the tin door. I feared he would escape the laboratory, leave the island, and continue experimenting somewhere else. I’d had no choice but to open the door. A crack, that was all it had taken, to let Jaguar – one of my father’s creations – slip inside and slice him apart.
I smiled at the professor. ‘I’m fine. Really.’
‘Elizabeth is better with this sort of thing. You’ll feel more comfortable with another woman in the house, someone to speak with freely. What would a wrinkled old man know about a girl’s feelings? You’re probably in love with some boy and wondering what earrings to wear to catch his eye.’
He was only teasing now, and it made me laugh. ‘You know me better than that.’
‘Do I? Yes, I suppose so.’ He gave his off-balance smile.
It wasn’t my way to be tender with people, but the professor was an old curmudgeon with a kind heart, and he’d done so much for me. Kept me from prison. Given me elegant clothes, kept me fed on French cuisine, and done his best to be the father figure I should have had.
On impulse I went to his end of the table, where I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and kissed his balding head. He patted my arm a little awkwardly, not used to me showing such emotion.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For all you’ve done for me.’
He cleared his throat a little awkwardly. ‘It’s been my pleasure, my dear,’ he said.
After dinner I climbed the stairs, jumping as the cuckoo clock sprang to life in the hallway. I considered ripping the loud-mouthed wooden bird out of its machinery, but the professor adored the old thing and patted the bird lovingly each night before bed. It was silly for him to be so sentimental over an old heirloom, but we all have our weaknesses.
I went to my room, where I locked the door and took out the silver fork I’d stolen from the dinner table, pressing my finger against the sharp tines. The professor had set up accounts at the finer stores in town for me, but what I needed was cash – paper money for my secret attic’s rent, for the equipment and ingredients for my serums, and grafting roses only paid so much. I stared at the fork, regretting the need to steal from the man who’d given me a life again. But as I looked out the window at the dark sky and saw the snow falling in gentle flakes, flashing when hit by the lights of a passing carriage, I told myself I was desperate.
And desperation could lead a person to things one might never do otherwise.
3
That night, like most nights, I lay in my sprawling bed, staring at the ceiling, and trying desperately not to think about Montgomery.
It never worked.
When I had moved into the professor’s home, he had wallpapered my bedroom ceiling in a dusky pale rose print. Now, my eyes found hidden shapes among the soft buds, remembering the boy who would never give me flowers again.
‘He loves me,’ I whispered to nothing and to no one, counting the petals. ‘He loves me not.’
When I’d been a girl of seven and he a boy of nine, he’d once accompanied us to our relatives’ country estate. One morning after Mother and Father had gotten in a terrible row, I’d found a small bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace on my dresser. I’d never had the courage to ask Montgomery if he’d left them. When Mother found the flowers, she tossed them out the window.
Weeds, she had said.
Years later, he’d given me flowers on the island, when we were no longer children and he’d outgrown his shyness. He’d won my affection, but his betrayal had left my heart dashed against the rocks, broken and bleeding.
‘He loves me, he loves me not,’ I whispered. ‘He’ll forget me, he’ll forget me not. He’ll find me, he’ll find me not …’
I sighed, letting the sounds of my whispers float up to the rose-colored wallpaper. I rolled over, burying my face in my pillow.
You must stop with such childish games, I told myself, as the place beneath my left rib began to ache.
The next morning the professor took me to the weekly flower show at the Royal Botanical Gardens, held in the palatial glass-and-steel greenhouse known as the Palm House, where I found myself surrounded by ranunculus and orchids and spiderlike lilies, and where the only things more ostentatious than the flowers were the dozens of fine ladies sweating in their winter coats. A year ago I’d never thought I would find myself wearing elegant clothes once more, amid ladies whose perfume rivaled the flowers, who tittered about my past behind my back but wouldn’t dare say anything to my face.
It was shocking how much one’s fate could twist in a single year.
The professor, who I was quite certain wished to be anywhere but in a sweaty greenhouse surrounded by ladies, wandered off to inspect the mechanical system that opened the upper windows, leaving me alone to the sly looks and catty whispers of the other ladies.
… used to work as a maid …
… father dead, you know, mother turned to pleasing men for money …
… pretty enough, but something off about her …
Through a forest of towering lilies, a woman in the next aisle caught my eye. For a moment she looked like my mother, though Mother’s hair had been darker, and she’d been thinner in the face. It was more the way this woman hung on the arm of a much older white-haired man, dressed finely with a silver-handled cane. The woman wore no wedding ring – so the man was her lover, not her husband.
The couple paused, and the woman stopped to admire the lilies. I was about to leave when I overheard her say, ‘Buy me one, won’t you, Sir Danvers?’
Sir Danvers. I gave him another look, discreetly, studying the expensive cane, the bones of his face. Yes, it was he. Sir Danvers Carew, Member of Parliament, a popular lord and landowner – and one of the men who used to keep my mother as his mistress. He’d seemed kind, like his reputation, until he turned to drink. He had once knocked Mother around the living room, then struck my leg with that same cane when I’d tried to stop him. I hadn’t thought of him in years, and yet now my shin ached with phantom pain from that day.
I turned away sharply, though there was no danger of him recognizing me. Back then I’d been the skinny child of a mistress he hadn’t kept but a few weeks, and now I was one of the elegant young ladies come to admire hothouse flowers in winter.
‘May I show you these lilies, miss?’ a vendor across the aisle said. I turned my head, still a bit dazed by the memories. ‘They’re a new hybrid I developed myself,’ she continued. ‘I cross-pollinated them with Bourgogne lilies from France.’
Eager to be away from Sir Danvers, I pretended to admire the flowers. The blooms were beautiful, but the hybridization had made the stems too thick. They would have done better crossed with Camden lilies to keep the stems strong but delicate. I didn’t dare start talking aloud about splicing and hybridization, though – I’d have sounded too much like Father.
I swallowed. ‘They’re beautiful.’
‘There you are!’ called a voice at my side. Lucy came tripping along the steam grates in a tight green velvet suit, fanning her face. ‘I’ve been up and down every hall looking for you. Oh, this blasted heat.’ With her free hand she dabbed a handkerchief at the sweat on her forehead. Beneath our feet, the boilers churned out another blast of steam that rose as in a Turkish bath. I inhaled deeply, letting it seep into my pores. I felt healthier here, in the tropical warmth, where the symptoms of my illness never seemed quite as bad.
Lucy glanced rather disdainfully at a bucket of mangled daisies with broken stems. ‘Good lord. It looks as though someone pruned those flowers with a butter knife.’
‘It isn’t about the sharpness of the blade,’ I said. ‘It’s about the hand that holds it.’
‘Well, if you ask me, that hand isn’t anything special either. Must we come here every week? What do I care for flowers, unless a young man is giving them to me?’
I smiled. ‘Which dashing young man would that be? You seem to have quite a few these days.’
Her powdered cheeks grew pinker as she brushed by a display of orchids, absently knocking their petals to the floor. ‘Papa prefers John Newcastle, of course, and I know he’s handsome and a self-made man and all that, but he’s so boring. And then there’s Henry, and my goodness, I simply can’t abide him. He’s from Finland, you know, which might as well be the end of the earth. He hadn’t even seen an automobile until one practically ran him over in Wickham Park.’
As I watched her carelessly knock over an entire plant, I said, ‘For a boy you keep claiming to dislike, you certainly seem to dwell on him.’
She gasped with indignation and rattled on more about her other suitors, but I only half listened. I’d heard all this before, time and time again, different young men depending on the week. I nodded absently while I stooped to clean up the flowers she’d knocked over.
‘Really, Juliet,’ Lucy said in exasperation. ‘You must remember you’re not a maid anymore.’
I paused. She was right. I lived with a wealthy guardian now and was back in good social standing. Seeing Sir Danvers and remembering my mother’s fall from grace had made me relive my former shame all over again. At the far end of the aisle, Sir Danvers and his mistress admired some orchids. He tapped the cane on the steel grates at his feet, sending vibrations all the way to where we stood. I had the sudden urge to stride over, snatch the cane from his hand, and slam the silver tip into his shin, as he had once done to mine. For a man his age, it wouldn’t take much force to shatter the bone.
My hands itched for that cane. More tittering laughter came from behind me, cruel and high-pitched, and I imagined the flower show ladies whispering among themselves.
… violent tendencies …
… well, with a father like hers …
Itch, itch, itch. But I forced myself to turn away. The professor wanted to prove I could be a respectable young lady despite who my father had been. The only problem was, being respectable wasn’t nearly as second nature as I had thought it would be.
I turned my back on them, facing the frost-covered wall of the greenhouse, beyond which I could make out the shadowy shapes of falling snow. As I watched, a black police carriage pulled up outside. My breath froze. Ever since Scotland Yard officers had arrested me in response to Dr Hastings’s accusations, I’d been jumpy around policemen.
All that is behind you, I reassured myself.
But the carriage stopped, and a handsome officer perhaps ten years my senior climbed out, and through the glass panes dripping with condensation, he looked directly at me.
I turned toward the sprays of ferns, Sir Danvers forgotten, thoughts racing. If this had been Father’s island, I could have disappeared into those vines with silent steps I’d learned from his beast-men. But large as the greenhouse was, the police would find me in minutes.
Lucy gave me a strange look, dabbing at her brow. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’
‘The police are here,’ I whispered. I jerked my chin toward the door at the far end of the palm court, where the groan of the heavy iron door sounded. I should get away from Lucy. It would only humiliate her to have her friend arrested so publicly.
I started for the door to intercept him, but Lucy grabbed my arm. ‘The police? Oh, don’t tell me you’re still afraid of the police. That was ages ago, and everything was sorted out. And look at you; you’d look like royalty if you’d just stop slouching so much. Only criminals slouch.’
My heart pounded harder as the officer appeared through the vines that draped from the catwalk above. He was a tall man with a sweep of chestnut hair that matched Lucy’s, and he walked with the confidence of the upper classes. Not a beat patrol officer, then. They’d sent someone important for me – how thoughtful. He was dressed in a fine dark suit with an old-fashioned copper bulletproof breastplate beneath his cravat, and a pistol at his hip.
My muscles twitched, urging me to flee, but Lucy’s arm still held me.
‘Oh, him?’ She sighed. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. He’s not here for you. Papa must have sent him to collect me.’
I looked between the officer and Lucy, still not understanding. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s John Newcastle, the suitor Papa’s so fond of,’ she said. ‘I was just telling you about him. Weren’t you listening? Really, Juliet.’
I stared at her. ‘You didn’t say he was a police officer!’
‘He isn’t a police officer,’ she said, fluffing her hair where the humidity had made it go flat. ‘He’s an inspector. Scotland Yard’s top inspector.’ Her voice dropped to a mutter. ‘He’s rather fond of telling me how important he is, not to mention handsome. He’d marry himself, I do believe, if he could.’
‘Lucy—’ I started, but Inspector Newcastle reached us then and gave us a dashing smile, his eyes only darting to me in a perfunctory manner before settling on Lucy.
‘Lucy, darling.’ He bent forward to kiss her cheek, which left a glistening mark that she dabbed at with the handkerchief.
‘Papa sent you, I presume?’
‘He invited me to supper, and I offered to come collect you.’
She pounced on my arm again. ‘John, this is my friend Juliet Moreau. Oh, Juliet, I’ve a fine idea. Go ask the professor if you can join us for a bite to eat.’ Her insistent wink told me she didn’t want to spend an extra moment alone with her suitor.
‘Yes, you’re welcome to join us, Miss Moreau.’ He extended his hand to take mine, but as soon as my fingers were in his, his hand tightened. ‘Have we met before? Your name sounds somewhat familiar.’
I glanced at Lucy. ‘I don’t believe so, Inspector. I think I would remember.’ I extracted my fingers from his grasp, wishing I could just as easily remove his suspicions about my name from his thoughts. I nodded my chin toward his copper breastplate. ‘What an unusual piece. Is it an antique?’
‘Why, yes,’ he said, clearly pleased. ‘It belonged to my grandfather. A lieutenant in the Crimean War. Kept him alive despite five bullets and a gunpowder explosion. I try to be a modern man, and we have better protective garments these days, but a little sentimental superstition can be healthy, don’t you think?’ He tapped his breastplate good-naturedly.
I smiled, relieved I’d managed to distract him from my name.
Lucy slid her arm into mine and said, ‘Juliet’s quite a tragic case, I’m afraid. Both parents dead, left penniless. She even had to work at one point.’
She started to lead me toward the door, but I pulled away a little too fast. I had errands to run before returning home, errands I had to keep secret.
‘Thank you for the offer, but I’ve plans with the professor. It was a pleasure meeting you, Inspector. I’ll see you soon, Lucy.’
I ducked away from them and found the professor amid the crowd, still engrossed by the rusted mechanics of the greenhouse. He smiled warmly when he saw me.
‘I wondered if you’d mind if I had a bite to eat with Lucy,’ I said.
‘Well, certainly,’ he said, eyes twinkling. Now he could go home to his books and a thick slice of Mary’s gingerbread cake. I kissed him on the cheek and hurried through the tunnel of palms to the doorway, where I could at last be on my own. I took one last breath of the thick, warm air, before pushing the heavy door open and bracing for the cold.
A swirling gust of snow ruffled my velvet skirts. The botanical garden’s ice-covered lake spread in front of me, the water sprite fountain in the center now frozen under a waterfall of ice.
I’d get an earful from Lucy later. She wouldn’t like that I’d left her to fend off John Newcastle’s kisses alone. But just being around the police – even a well-mannered inspector – made me nervous.
And I had my errands to run.
I drew my fur-lined coat around my neck and waited behind the frozen skeleton of an azalea for Inspector Newcastle and Lucy to leave. They climbed into the black carriage amid pleasantries I couldn’t make out, save for a single curse from Lucy when her skirt caught on the curb. I smiled at her impropriety as their carriage rolled away over the cobblestone.
Pulling my coat tighter, I made my way toward Covent Garden. The sun was already heading for the horizon, so I slipped into an alleyway that would cut my walk by half. The alley was quiet, save for a pair of cats chasing each other through abandoned crates.
Ahead of me a short young man approached from the opposite direction, cap pulled low over his brow so his face was hidden in shadows. As our paths grew closer, he took his time looking me up and down, giving me gooseflesh. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and I noticed that he was missing his middle finger – a difficult detail to ignore. I stiffened. The only reason an otherwise warmly dressed man wouldn’t wear gloves on a day this cold was if he planned on needing his dexterity for something.
I stepped into the street to pass him with a wide berth, but he spun around and walked alongside me. The hair on the back of my neck rose. I forced myself to keep walking, hoping he’d just doubled back on some forgotten errand, even though I knew it was too late for wishes. I glanced at my boot, where a knife was hidden – a trick I’d learned from Montgomery.
‘Spare a coin, miss?’ the man asked, suddenly right at my side, in a voice that seemed unnaturally deep. His bare fingers reached out, the missing middle finger leaving an unnatural vacancy.
I jerked away. ‘Sorry, no.’
‘With those fine buttons? Come on, miss. Just a coin. It isn’t safe out here, alone on the streets. Not safe for a girl at all.’
I saw his arm twitch a second before he grabbed my coat. I ducked out of his grasp and pulled the knife from my boot, then shoved him against the curb at the right angle for his ankles to catch. It threw him off-balance and he fell. I collapsed on top of him, knee digging into the soft center of his chest, knife at his throat, as I checked the alley to make certain we were alone.
His cap fell back, and I started as shoulder-length red hair tumbled out around a pretty face. A girl younger than me, disguised as a man, which explained the put-on deep voice. That was good – a girl I could scare off. A man I might have had to inflict some damage upon.
‘I know it isn’t safe,’ I hissed. ‘What do you think knives are for?’
I pressed the knife closer against her neck, watching the flesh wrinkle beneath it. Her eyes went wide.
‘I didn’t mean nothing!’ she said, voice substantially higher now. ‘Please, miss, I swear, I just wanted them buttons!’
I narrowed my eyes at her, digging my knee deeper until I felt a rib, and then gave an extra jab before climbing off her.
I jerked my chin toward the opposite street. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘And next time put some lampblack on your chin to look like a beard, and for god’s sakes wear gloves; your bare hands gave you away instantly.’
She scrambled to her feet, brushing the muck off her clothes, and stumbled away at a run. I sheathed the knife in the boot holster, then wiped a trembling hand over my face, breathing some life back into my cold hands.
I took off at a brisk walk, still shaken, the afternoon clouds overhead the only witness to the incident I couldn’t forget fast enough, until at last I saw the shining lights of Covent Garden.
4
The market was filled at all hours with a vast range of people, and I gladly plunged into the safety of their midst. Ladies in fine dresses shopped for Christmas presents, scullery maids swarmed past the wrinkle-faced vegetable women, tailors and seamstresses haggled in the textile quarter. My fine coat and boots caused no one to give me a second glance, until I slipped into the meat section of the market. Few fine young ladies could stomach these narrow passageways. Eels as long as my arm twitched on hooks above lambs’ glassy dead eyes, and stray cats licked up the salty blood pooling on the floor. By the time I reached Joyce’s Choice Meats, I was getting nothing but strange looks.
Jack Joyce, however, tipped his hat to me.
Joyce, an Irish ex-boxer who’d turned to the meat trade in his old age, cracked a broken-toothed grin as I approached. His previous profession had left him not only minus a few teeth but with a permanent squint eye that never seemed to be looking in the same direction as the other. A small black dog with a white spot on his chest and notable only in his ugliness, wagged his tail.
‘Hello, Joyce,’ I said, and then knelt to scratch the dog’s bony head. In general, I did my best to stay away from animals. They only reminded me of the dark experimentation Father had done. That was why I limited myself to plants. Roses couldn’t kill, or maim, or betray.
‘And hello to you too, boy.’ I picked up the dog, though he was heavy in my arms. ‘He’s put on a pound or two, I believe.’
‘Aye. Soon enough he’ll be fatter than a queen’s lapdog, if you keep buying him scraps. And just as lazy.’ Joyce took his knobby old hands away from his fire and dug around behind the counter until he came back with some chicken bones that he tossed to the dog.
Technically, the dog was mine. He’d started following me around town ever since I’d first come to Joyce’s Meats six months ago. It was the meat in my pocket he smelled, and the only way I could get him to keep from trailing at my heels was to pay Joyce to keep him well-fed on scraps, a task that despite his grumbling, I suspected, the old boxer rather enjoyed.
‘Let’s see,’ Joyce said, digging around beneath the counter. He came up with a package wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine. ‘Here’s your order. Two pancreases, one liver. Couldn’t get my hands on the deer heart you wanted. I should have it next week.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, slipping the package into my pocket. Just being here stirred the bones of my hands from their slumber, made them remember what Father had done to me. I flexed them, hoping to hold off the symptoms of another fit.
The dog finished his chicken bone and barked at Joyce, who stooped down on his bad knee and scratched the dog’s head. ‘When are you going to give this ugly fellow a name already?’ he asked.
I leaned against the counter, watching the dog thumping his tail. ‘He isn’t my dog.’
‘Don’t think he understands that.’
‘My guardian wouldn’t care much for a stray in his house. I fear I’m already uncivilized enough for him.’ I didn’t mention how the last dog I’d named, a puppy called Crusoe, had died under Father’s scalpel. The thought made my stiff hands ache more, and I pushed them into my coat pockets.
Joyce grinned. ‘Aw, you could use a companion. Keep him in a back garden. How about Romeo, eh? Romeo and Juliet, you were made for one another.’
‘I was made for a flea-ridden stray?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Though in any case, Romeo doesn’t suit him. Who’s that boxer you’re always talking about? The underdog. That mutt’s an underdog, if I’ve ever seen one.’
‘Mike Sharkey,’ Joyce said. ‘Pride of Ireland. He beat that big Turkish bloke four to one. What do you say, fella? Are you a Sharkey?’
I watched Joyce pet him and scratch beneath his chin. Joyce had always been friendly with me, and never once asked what a well-dressed young woman wanted with so many animal organs.
‘Hope you’re taking care out there, miss, walking around town on your own, especially this late in the afternoon. It’ll be dark soon. You’ve heard about the murders, I wager?’
‘Which murders? This is London. There are a dozen murders every day.’
His eyes went serious beneath his brow. ‘Didn’t read the morning paper, did you?’ He rooted around in the stack of old newspapers he used to wrap cuts of meat and slapped one down on the table.
‘A MASS MURDERER IN THE MAKING?’ the headline read.
‘Three murders in the last two days,’ Joyce said. ‘Scotland Yard says they’re connected; the murderer leaves his mark at each crime scene. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. They’re calling him the Wolf of Whitechapel on account of how he claws up the bodies. One of them had a purse on him and a gold watch, but the murderer didn’t touch it. Wasn’t interested in anything but tearing that man apart like an animal.’
Like an animal.
The twist in my gut grew to a desperate squeeze, and I had to lean on the counter to catch my breath. Like an animal, that’s how Edward had killed his victims. Ripped their hearts out with six-inch claws.
My hand slid to my chest, pressing against the hard whalebone corset. On the island, I’d seen a woman with her jaw ripped off. Buzzing flies. A blood-stained tarpaulin. Mauled, like all the others.
To this day, even so long after his death, my heart wrenched to think that Edward had killed so many of the islanders. He had seemed such an innocent young man, and yet beneath his skin lurked a monster.
A monster created by my father.
‘Christ, didn’t mean to frighten you, miss. I forget you’re a proper lady sometimes.’
‘It’s quite all right, Joyce,’ I said with a shaky smile.
I started to pick up the package to go when he said, ‘You just be careful, miss. Flowers dipped in blood, that’s his mark. That’s how they know the bodies are connected.’
I slowly turned back to him. The professor had said that a flower had been found beside the body of that terrible solicitor, Daniel Penderwick, who had taken my family’s fortune on behalf of the bank. Shocked that I had been acquainted with the first victim of what the police thought might be a mass murderer, I pointed toward the paper. ‘On second thought, do you mind if I read that article?’
He passed me the newspaper and I pored over it carefully. There was Penderwick’s name, listed as the Wolf of Whitechapel’s first victim. A second victim had been found last night, torn apart with violent wounds, and a white flower left nearby. The victim’s name made me start.
Annie Benton.
A creeping feeling began in my ankles, making my toes curl. Annie Benton had been my roommate when I worked as a maid at King’s College. She’d had a bad habit of digging through my belongings. A few months ago she’d gotten back in touch with me under the pretense of friendship, but had then stolen my mother’s small diamond ring – the only thing I had left of her.
I leaned against the butcher’s stand to steady myself. If I’d read Annie’s name in any other context, I would have been seething with anger, but the thought of her murdered by such violent means left me feeling strangely hollow and out of place, as though time was moving backward.
Was it coincidence that I’d known two of the victims?
‘These are the only murders? Annie Benton and Penderwick?’
‘Rumors of another one found just an hour ago. Unidentified body – so they claim,’ Joyce said. ‘I’d like to think there won’t be more, but Scotland Yard don’t have much to go on.’
The creeping sensation ran up the backs of my legs. My vision started to go foggy as blood pooled in my extremities. I gripped the butcher’s stand harder and accidentally brushed against one of the glassy-eyed pig’s heads. I jumped and cried out.
‘You feeling all right, lass?’
‘Yes,’ I stuttered. ‘Here – some coins for this package, and to keep the dog fed. I should go.’
‘I’ll see you next week for the usual order?’
I nodded before leaving, still clutching Joyce’s newspaper, along with the meat. It wasn’t until I was halfway to Highbury, and the sun had dipped behind the skyline, that I realized I’d taken the wrong road.
I’d wandered into the seedy end of Whitshire, where rats outnumbered the people ten to one and more gaslights were broken than not. The hair rose on the back of my neck, reminding me of my altercation with the girl thief earlier. I’d been lucky that time to escape unharmed. I might not be lucky again.
I took a deep breath as I mentally worked out a map for the direction I needed to go to get me back to a well-lit street. I hurried past a dress shop full of headless mannequins, taking care to avoid the open street, but a foggy feeling crept upon me.
Stay near the lampposts, I told myself. Stay near the light.
I turned the corner onto a shadowy street with only a single lamp glowing at the far end, and my heartbeat sped. After a few minutes I felt the neck-tingling sensation that I was being followed, and considered reaching for the knife in my boot. But as I strained my ears, I made out only the sound of little footsteps that stopped when I stopped, and when I whirled around to face my pursuer, the little black dog was behind me. He wagged his tail.
‘Oh, Sharkey,’ I gasped. He ran over and I gave him a good scratch. ‘You weren’t supposed to follow me! I haven’t time to take you back to the market now – I’ll be late getting home as is.’ I sighed. ‘Well, come on.’
It was a quiet evening, save for the wind that ruffled the strands of hair that had come loose from my braid. I hurried through the streets with Sharkey at my heels, though I hadn’t a clue how I’d explain him to the professor. Lock him in the garden, perhaps, until morning. It was impossible to think about anything but the murders, until I nearly stepped on a white flower on the ground in front of me.
I stopped.
A flower itself was rare enough in winter. I knew all too well how much care and tending they needed to stay as fresh as this one was. It lay all by itself on a patch of sidewalk wiped of snow as though someone had left it for me, creamy white petals radiating from a gold center, a delicate stem no thicker than a bootlace.
A tropical flower.
There was a rustle in the alleyway to my side – a rat, no doubt – and the dog took off after it. I knelt in front of the flower. Five petals, not unlike the ones that had grown on Father’s island. Montgomery had picked one, once, from the garden wall and tucked it behind my ear. The memory of Montgomery made the place around my rib throb with familiar hurt.
He loves me, he loves me not …
My heart twisted at the memory, and I turned to go. I should get home, before I was late for supper and the professor grew suspicious. But the flower was so beautiful, delicate as a whisper there in the snow, that I couldn’t leave it.
I pulled off a glove and reached down to pick it up.
As soon as I did, I knew something was wrong. My bare fingers touched a wet substance beneath the flower. I held my fingers up to the faint light from the lamppost.
Blood.
Blood spotted the back of the flower, as though it had been pressed into a pool of it. It was still fresh.
5
Flowers dipped in blood, Joyce’s voice echoed. That’s his mark.
In a blind panic I stumbled to my feet, screaming for Sharkey. His little face peeked out from the alleyway.
‘Come here, boy!’ I cried.
He took a few shaky steps toward me, and my eyes went to the tracks he left in the snow.
His paw prints were bloody.
‘Sharkey!’ I raced toward him, scooping him up and checking his feet, his legs, his body for cuts, but it wasn’t his blood in the snow, and I set him back down. Whose blood was it? He must have tracked the blood from within the alleyway, and whatever he’d seen or smelled in there now made him shiver and bury his snout in the fold of my arm.
The light was dark, and I fumbled for a matchbox in my coat pocket. I knew I shouldn’t look, and yet it was impossible not to. I lit a match and took a step deeper into the alleyway, then another, and another, despite my every sense screaming to turn away. The match light caught on a dark pile of rags in the corner, splashed with blood that smelled sharp in the crisp air. A pale hand lay beneath the pile, missing a middle finger, heavily bruised as though it had been trampled.
I jolted with recognition – the girl who tried to steal my silver buttons not but an hour ago, now trampled and bleeding. Murdered.
I took in the crime scene in flashes of the flickering match, my mind whirling as I stumbled closer, then away, then closer yet again, my instincts caught in a frantic fight-or-flight, curiosity winning in the struggle. I could only see tears in her men’s clothing, smell the blood. In my delirium, it brought back too many memories from the island.
A crack of ice sounded behind me. I gasped, afraid I wasn’t alone, and broke into a frantic run with Sharkey at my heels. I raced through the snow, ignoring the burn in my lungs. Sweat poured down my back like oozing fear, and my strangled breath grew shallower the farther I ran, past the row of closed doors, past the dress shop with headless mannequins, into the wider street where lights shone like beacons of safety.
I collapsed in the doorway of a closed bakery and glanced behind to make sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone other than Sharkey, who trotted up beside me. Visions of the girl thief’s body haunted me. Steam still rising from the body, signaling a fresh kill. The murderer must have been there moments before – the murderer Scotland Yard was so desperately hunting. The man who had killed Daniel Penderwick. Annie Benton. An unnamed victim.
And now one more.
The wind blew cold enough to make my teeth ache. A rusty hinge groaned, and I jumped back into a run. It all threatened to overwhelm me – the thief’s body curled in the snow, the bloody flower – and I had to choke back a sob. At last I reached the church on the corner and turned onto Dumbarton Street, where I slowed to a jittery walk. Sharkey trotted beside me, still shivering. I picked him up and wrapped him in the folds of my coat as best I could, mindless of the blood getting on the fabric.
It wasn’t easy to climb the professor’s garden trellis with the dog tucked inside my coat, but I managed. The window had a keyed lock, but I had broken through that my second night in the house. Hydrochloric acid was easy to get from the chemist’s, and it dissolved iron even in small doses. After that it had been a simple matter of replacing it with a similar lock to which I held the key.
I eased the window up as quietly as I could and climbed inside. I wiped Sharkey’s paws with a handkerchief before setting him on the rug, then tore off my coat and stripped out of my dress and corset and all the trappings I was made to wear, leaving them pooled in the corner of the room.
Tomorrow I’d hide the bloody clothes from the maid.
Tomorrow I’d see things clearly again.
Today, though, all I could manage was to dress in fresh clothes and grab another coat, then climb back out of my window and return to the front door so the professor wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong. I smoothed my hair back, checking my hands one last time for flecks of blood, and then pressed a trembling finger against the door chime.
An eternity passed before Mary answered, drying her hands on a cotton towel, her face flushed from the kitchen fire. She had the smell of ginger on her and a streak of rust-colored cinnamon across her apron, but all I could think of was blood, and my stomach lurched.
‘Evening, miss.’ She barely glanced at me as she brushed away the streak of cinnamon. I had to force my body to step into the foyer. Close the door behind me. Lock it tight.
From the dining room came a half-strangled sound like a cat dying, and my nerves flared to life again. I should tell someone about the body. I must. And yet the police would have certainly found her by now. If I said anything, there would be questions: why was I in such a rough neighborhood, not at tea with Lucy where I belonged …
Mary sighed as another mechanical shriek came from the dining room. ‘It’s that clock of his,’ she whispered. ‘Broke this morning while you were out, and he’s gotten it into his head to fix it himself.’ Another strangled cry of the wood bird sounded. ‘Maybe you can convince him to take it to the clockmaker.’ She sniffed the air suddenly. ‘The gingerbread!’
As she fled to the kitchen, I undid the buttons of my coat, glancing up the stairs toward my bedroom where the little dog was hidden from the world along with the bloodstained coat. My fingers felt stiff, my limbs like wood. I entered the dining room like a ghost, and I must have looked the same, but the professor was so occupied by the broken clock that he didn’t do more than glance at me as I sank onto one of the straight-backed dining chairs at the table.
I wanted to rest my head in my hands. I wanted to tell him everything.
‘Blast these tiny parts,’ he muttered, holding up a spring no larger than his fingernail. ‘They were made for nimbler fingers.’
The wooden clock sat upright on the table, its insides laid out as the professor performed his mechanical autopsy. He hadn’t practiced surgery in over a decade, but his skill was apparent in the way he cataloged the clock’s parts, testing each one methodically for faults. I kept my hands clasped under the table, my mind still too numb for words.
Mary brought out a plate of gingerbread cut into star shapes, warning us not to eat too many and ruin our appetites, though that hardly stopped the professor. I couldn’t yet face returning to my room, to the dog who had trod in a dead girl’s blood, and to the stains on my coat. Besides, watching the professor work calmed me. He was careful and attentive, but he paused for bites of cake. So unlike my father, who had been so serious. So unlike me, too.
I stayed up quite late to avoid the secrets stashed in my bedroom, long after Mary left for the day and the professor retired to bed. Then, by the light of a lantern, I worked on the clock myself, using an old book of mechanics to repair the broken gears that were too small for the professor’s arthritic old fingers. At last I replaced the final screw and closed the clock’s wooden door. When the professor woke in the morning, it would be to the god-awful squawk of that blasted bird he loved so much. It wasn’t much to repay his kindness, but it was something.
At last I climbed the stairs with weary limbs and closed myself in my bedroom. The fire had long since gone out. When I called Sharkey, he came out from under the bed, blinking, and something broke inside me.
I grabbed him and slid between the covers, my body wracked in shivers, and pulled the little dog against me. We shivered together under the expensive duvets and sheets, neither of us belonging in so fine a house.
There was no sleep for me that night. I tried to picture the alleyway again, to remember exactly what the thief girl’s wounds had looked like, but the match light had been so faint, and my fear had been a distorting lens. Certainly it wasn’t strange that a girl who’d tried to rob me had later ended up dead. She was a criminal, after all, and she’d been in a dangerous neighborhood. Maybe she’d tried to pick the wrong pocket, or gotten in a brawl, or someone had found out there wasn’t a man’s body under that clothing.
I let these dangerous thoughts unfurl in my head, exploring them cautiously, feeling their weight. After some time, when I was certain the professor was fast asleep, I climbed out of my warm bed where the little dog snored softly, and relit the fire. Once it crackled to life, I knelt by my pile of crumpled clothes, ready to burn them. I could smell the blood on them, along with something more fragrant – pollen.
I dug through until I found the flower. Why had I kept it? I should have thrown it to the street, but for some reason I’d slipped it in my coat pocket instead.
I could still get rid of it. Burn it in the fire. Throw it out the window.
Instead, I kept the flower separate and burned my bloody coat and dress. With trembling fingers, I carefully placed the flower within the pages of my journal. I don’t know what instinct made me keep such a bloody memento of a murderer. Call it sentimentality. Call it curiosity.
Just don’t call it madness.
6
In the morning, the previous day’s adventures seemed as unreal as nightmares, and yet the flower pressed within my journal was real enough, as was the sleeping dog beside me.
All trace of my bloody coat had burned in the fireplace except for the silver buttons, which I slipped into my pocket. I wasn’t looking forward to telling the professor I’d need a new one. I pulled out Jack Joyce’s newspaper and reread the article again. The familiar names of the victims stared at me from the page, as did another name – Inspector John Newcastle. Lucy’s ambitious young suitor had been chosen to lead the investigation into the Wolf of Whitechapel, and I wasn’t certain whether this news was welcome or not; as much as I loathed the idea of seeking information from the police, Inspector Newcastle might be able to give me more clues about the murderer and his victims. But how could I possibly explain my interest to the inspector? Well-bred seventeen-year-old girls weren’t fascinated by murder suspects, as a rule. If I said three of the four victims had personally wronged me, I’d become the prime suspect.
My fingers clenched the newsprint. If only Montgomery were here, he’d know what to do. He had always been better than me at these things: investigating, tracking, lying. For the longest time I’d thought him a terrible liar, and yet in the end, he’d fooled me well enough. I could still remember his voice: You shouldn’t have anything to do with me. I’m guilty of so many crimes. He’d warned me plain as day, and yet I’d still fallen in love with him, believed we had a future … and now here I was, alone with ink-stained fingers, only a dog for company and an old man who didn’t begin to know the truth about me.
I skipped over Inspector Newcastle’s name and let my gaze linger on the last line of the article, a line that I’d barely glanced at in my hurry yesterday: ‘The bodies are being kept in King’s College of Medical Research until autopsies can be performed to shed light on the exact nature of the deaths.’
King’s College – I knew those dark hallways only too well. I’d scrubbed blood from the mortar there, dusted cobwebs from between skeletons’ bones. That was where Dr Hastings had decided a simple cleaning girl wouldn’t dare refuse his sexual advances, and I’d slit his wrist. I still remembered the crimson color of his blood on the tile.
The last thing I wanted to do was return to those hallways.
And yet the bodies there called to me, promising to tell me the answers buried within their cold flesh.
It was a call I couldn’t resist.
I dressed and came downstairs with a lie prepared about needing to do some Christmas shopping in the market. To my surprise, I heard sounds of arguing and found the professor in the library with a visitor, a stout man with stiff waxed hair and thick glasses whose face froze when he saw me standing in the doorway.
‘Ah, Juliet, you’re awake,’ the professor said, rising to his feet. His mouth was still tense from their argument, but he forced a smile as he pulled me into the hallway.
‘Who’s that man?’ I asked, trying to peek around his shoulder.
‘Isambard Lessing. A historian, one of the King’s Club men. No need to concern yourself with him; he’s here to inquire about some old journals and family heirlooms. Did you need something?’
‘I was thinking of going shopping. This close to Christmas—’
‘Yes, yes, a fine idea,’ he said, herding me toward the stairs. He fumbled in his pocket for some bank notes and pressed them into my hand. ‘I’ll see you back here for supper.’
I muttered a silent prayer of thanks that he was distracted and wasted no time hurrying from the house with Sharkey. I took the dog to the market and firmly deposited him with Joyce, so by the time I got to King’s College – wearing an old apron over my fashionable red dress – classes were already in session for the morning. I entered through the main double doors into the glistening hallway with polished wood-inlay floors and wall sconces bearing electric lights. My boots echoed loudly in the empty hallways. I’d never felt comfortable on this main floor, the realm of academics and well-off students from good families. Grainy photographs lined the walls showing the illustrious history of the university and its construction. One brass frame bore the crest of the King’s Club with the motto underneath: Ex scientia vera. From knowledge, truth. I thought of stiff Isambard Lessing and his red face. I paused to look at the date on the frame’s inscription.
1875. Four years before I was born. The photograph documented the King’s Club membership at the time, two lines of a dozen male faces wearing long robes and serious expressions. Lucy’s railroad magnate father, Mr Radcliffe, was among them, his beard much shorter, standing next to a stout man I recognized as Isambard Lessing himself, and with a shudder I recognized a young Dr Hastings. I also found the professor’s face among them, decades younger but with the same wire-rim glasses and a hint of a smile on an otherwise stern face. On his left was a young man whose face I knew all too well – my father.
I shifted in my stiff clothing. The professor had mentioned they’d met in the King’s Club, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the photograph Father had dark hair cut in the fashion of the time, and his eyes were alert and focused, so unlike his wild-eyed, gray-haired visage I had known more recently. The face in the photograph was the face I knew from my earliest memories, when I’d idolized him, before madness and ambition had claimed him.
I tore myself away from the old photograph and hurried for the stairs to the basement, where I felt instantly more at ease. The morning cleaning crew was already hard at work scouring the stairs leading to the basement hallways. I recognized my old boss, Mrs Bell, as her rounded body stooped to scrub the treading. A woman who used to watch out for me when no one else did. When she stood to refill her bucket, I grabbed her hand and pulled her around the corner.
‘Mercy!’ she cried, putting a hand over her heart. ‘Juliet Moreau, is that you? My, but you gave me a fright.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bell. I wondered if I might ask you a favor.’
‘You aren’t wanting your old job back, I hope,’ she said, then cocked her head at the fine dress beneath my apron. ‘No, I suppose not …’
‘It isn’t about that. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a change in fortune, and it’s only right for me to share.’ I fished in my pocket for the silver buttons and pressed them into her hand before she could object. ‘I just need to know if you’ve already cleaned the hallways on the east side.’
The buttons jangled in her callused hand. ‘Heading there next, right after we finish these stairs.’
I bit my lip, glancing at the two other cleaning girls. ‘Could you start on the west side instead? It’s a long story … a student friend of mine thinks he might have dropped some cufflinks there and I’d like to look for them.’
She gave me a stern look, and I half expected her to ask what the real story was, but luckily for me she just threw her hand toward the hallways.
‘Have at it, girl.’
I started past the steps, where a rail-thin cleaning girl was polishing the brass handrail. Her basket sat beside her, filled with a collection of cleaning tools that were all quite familiar to me. How many hours had I spent on hands and knees on this very floor, sleeves hitched above my elbows, scrubbing so hard my knuckles bled? What a lonely life that had been, with only my memories to keep me company. How easily I could be back there if not for the professor.
The skinny girl turned around when she saw me staring at her basket. Her eyes went to the dirty apron that didn’t quite match my fine dress – an incongruity only the poor would notice.
‘Can I help you … miss?’ she asked.
‘Oh no,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. My mind was wandering.’
She nodded, still looking at me strangely, then returned to work. Once her back was turned, I bent down to pretend to lace my boots and secretly grabbed one of the brushes out of her basket, a soft-bristled one meant for cleaning fabric. If I ran into anyone here, I might need it as disguise. I hid it in my apron and hurried down the stairs into the basement.
The electric lights were on, buzzing and clicking, spilling artificial light over the tiles. Fresh sawdust had been sprinkled on them to soak up any blood fallen from patients or bodies. I wound my way down another corridor and paused at the closed door to the storage rooms where they kept cadavers for autopsies.
I peeked through the keyhole to make sure the room was empty. Unwanted memories returned of a night a year ago when Lucy and I had come here on a dare, only to stumble upon medical students dissecting a live rabbit. My arm twitched, just as that rabbit’s hind leg had, and I clamped a hand over my arm to keep it calm, hoping the rest of my illness’s symptoms wouldn’t soon follow. Through the keyhole, I spied cold tables draped with clothes.
Voices came down the hall, making me jump.
‘Old coot doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground,’ one said.
Whoever they were, their footsteps were headed my way. I pulled the soft-bristled brush out and stooped to hands and knees on the sawdust-covered floor just as two medical students rounded the corner.
‘You can’t expect him to—’ The one speaking paused when he saw me, but then continued. ‘You can’t expect him to graduate you when he couldn’t even pass the exams.’ The two students stepped over my arm as I pretended to scour the floor. One glanced back briefly, but I made sure to keep my face toward the ground. Cleaning girls weren’t worth anything to boys like them except a quick glance to see if they were pretty.
They neared the corner and I started to let out my held breath, until I heard a third voice behind them, clearly belonging to an older man.
‘Bentley! Filmore! Stop right there.’
My spine turned to ice. I knew that voice, even without looking at its owner. Dr Hastings – the professor who had attacked me last year and caused me to flee London. I fought the urge to panic and forced my hand to move rhythmically over the tiles, pretending to clean the mortar with a useless soft-bristled brush. As his footsteps neared, I cringed.
‘Yes, Doctor?’ one of the boys said, considerably more polite now.
Dr Hastings came to stand beside me. I glimpsed his silver-tipped shoes before quickly looking away.
Focus on the tiles. Focus on the tiles. Focus on the—
‘Don’t think I don’t know about those pranks you’ve been pulling. It’s one thing for boys to have a bit of fun, but quite another to chase me down Wiltshire at night. I nearly broke a shoelace.’
‘It wasn’t us, Doctor, I swear!’ one of them sniveled.
I didn’t worry about being recognized by most professors here – they never bothered to glance at the cleaning crew. But Dr Hastings had always been different. I think he liked to think of us on our hands and knees, cleaning up the messes he made. If he found me here now, he could do anything to me and not a soul would ever know.
I swallowed, wondering if I could crawl backward and scoot away. But to my relief, the two students had his entire attention. He stepped around me and started after them down the hall, chastising them about schoolboy pranks. The moment they were around the corner I leaped up, shoved the brush into my apron pocket, and snuck into the autopsy room.
I waited ten seconds, twenty, a minute, and heard no more voices. A shiver ran down my back as I found a switch on the wall. The artificial electric light snapped to life, bathing the room in a garish glow so much starker than the hurricane lamps my father used in his laboratory.
Eight tables lined the walls, four of which were occupied with cadavers. Each body was covered with a heavy cloth. One was large, over six and a half feet tall – that had to be Daniel Penderwick, the solicitor. In my memory he’d been tall as the devil himself, with just as black a heart. I lifted the cloth and looked at his pale, dead body. His naked chest was gutted open with slash marks now drained of blood. The wounds pulled me to them. They whispered truths – memories – I wasn’t certain I wanted to ever recall.
I approached the next body cautiously, uncertain who I’d find beneath the heavy cloth. Annie’s body would be here, as well as the thief girl’s. But what of the unidentified one? Would it be familiar to me, like the others? Could I still call it all a coincidence if it was?
I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart now torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.
I went to the next table, shakily leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie – or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved this?
Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I pulled back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we’d scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boarding-house’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.
It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping wounds in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for violence. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.
Eventually I moved on to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look in case it was someone dear to me, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked in surprise. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided with the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.
I recognized the fourth body.
It was the old white-haired man from the flower show, Sir Danvers Carew, the beloved member of Parliament who had once abused my mother and me. I’d seen him only days ago, and now … dead. I closed a hand over my mouth as my mind crawled over his pale face, his bloodstained skin, trying to understand. He had the same slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object. Like a cane. No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surely his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.
Four. I knew all four victims.
And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.
The idea made me step away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it – nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, four people who had wronged me.
Almost as though …
I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.
… almost as though someone was watching out for me.
I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.
A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.
By Edward.
Edward is dead, I told myself. The dead don’t come back.
And yet the fear kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already aching. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. On the island, I had read and memorized meticulous autopsy reports from Father’s files for all of Edward’s victims. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.
I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.
They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.
I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.
The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, there was no doubt.
Edward had done this.
7
I felt like the room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.
Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.
Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London – why? If it was only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.
My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.
We belong together, he had said. We’re the same.
Was that why he had returned, as part of a grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat after I’d spurned his advances?
I paced, hands knitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone …
Hands trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the bodies. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.
I couldn’t shake this new information: He’s alive. Alive. Alive.
Footsteps came from down the hall, and I spun, expecting to find Edward’s yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.
Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.
My heart shot to my throat. ‘Excuse me,’ I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.
‘Miss … Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?’
‘Nothing, Inspector,’ I stuttered. ‘Visiting some old friends.’
His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. ‘You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.’
‘Oh no, that isn’t what I meant. I used to work on this cleaning crew last year, before the professor took me in. I hadn’t seen them in a year, so …’ I swallowed, watching as his eyes followed my footsteps in the sawdust-covered floor to the storage room. My footsteps contradicted me. He’d know I’d been in there with the bodies.
My heart pounded. He could so easily make trouble for me, being down here where I wasn’t supposed to be, snooping around bodies. The professor’s guardianship could protect me only so far.
‘I came to check on the autopsy report for the latest victim of the Wolf of Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘But I would be happy to escort you back to the main floor.’
I sighed in relief. ‘That’s not necessary. I know my way. And I really must be going.’ I smiled as graciously as I could and turned away, heart pounding, feet unsteady on the tile floor. All I could think of was Edward. All I could feel was a thousand tangled emotions.
‘Wait, Miss Moreau.’
My eyes fell closed, only for an instant. I turned around with another shaky smile. The inspector wasn’t smiling now, as he dropped his voice to a whisper.
‘After I met you, I looked up your name. I’m protective of Lucy, you understand, and your name sounded so familiar. I found a police report …’ He glanced down the hallway, making sure we were alone. My instincts jumped to attention. A dozen scenarios flashed through my head of what I’d do if he tried to arrest me. All of them ended poorly for me.
‘It was self-defense,’ I said firmly. ‘Dr Hastings attacked me. I was a cleaning girl then; no one would believe me—’
He dismissed that with a wave. ‘None of that interests me. I’ve no doubt it was Hastings’s fault – it isn’t the first incident of this sort with his name on it. No, Miss Moreau, the reason I recalled your name was because of your father’s crimes, not your own.’
My body froze, afraid to take a single breath.
At my silence, he continued. ‘I was young at the time, in college training to be an investigator. The case was quite notorious. I went back and read the file on your father, and it seems the case was never closed. He fled England, and no one heard from him again. I hate to leave this sort of thing open, if we can file it away as a solved case. Your assistance, Miss Moreau, would be invaluable to our efforts.’
I stared at him, speechless. After I’d been hiding from the police for the last year, now they were coming to me for help? I might have laughed, if I hadn’t feared sounding like a madwoman.
‘I assure you, you can trust me,’ he continued. ‘We’ll handle the information in the most sensitive manner. It isn’t my intention to cause a sensation, just to solve a long-standing case. It would be a feather in my cap, you see, even lead to a promotion. Together with this Wolf of Whitechapel case, I would be made head of the entire division. Which means I’d be better suited to care for Lucy.’
‘Care for Lucy?’
He smiled boyishly. ‘It isn’t official, of course. I haven’t yet asked her father for her hand in marriage, but I know he’ll give me permission. Any day now, expect to get the news of our engagement.’
There was something undeniably tender about the way he said it. I was quite certain Lucy had no idea the inspector’s intentions were this immediate. My head whirled with the idea of Lucy wed, and Newcastle wanting me to help solve my own father’s case, and among it all, Edward. Alive.
Mrs Bell rounded the corner and stopped short when she saw us. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
I took the opportunity to step away from Inspector Newcastle. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s nothing I can help you with. I’ve heard rumors that my father is dead – I might trust those, if I were you.’
Before he could respond, I bade farewell to him and Mrs Bell, and hurried from the hallways where the electric lights still clicked and sputtered, as if warning me to never come back.
8
As soon as I left King’s College, I rounded the edge of the building and slumped against the rough brick wall, fighting to calm my erratic heartbeat. The day was clear but bitingly cold. My coat hung open, my hands bare, yet I didn’t reach for my gloves nor do up my buttons. I couldn’t. All I could manage was to slide down the brick wall to the frozen grass and let the cold seep up from the ground into me.
Edward was back from the dead.
If he truly was alive, if he had done this, then he must have been following me for some time. My mind searched through the past few weeks and months, trying to remember if I’d felt like I was being followed. But that was just it – one always felt followed in this city. Always felt eyes, always heard footsteps.
A flock of ravens alighted in the central courtyard, and my head whirled around. Was he following me even now? So many places to hide: behind those skeletal trees, on the rooftop of a nearby building …
I hugged my knees tight, not daring to close my eyes. If he knew about Annie stealing my mother’s ring, what else did he know? Did he know about my secret workshop and my growing illness? Did he know how I was stealing from the professor? Did he know that back on the island I’d opened the laboratory door so Jaguar could kill my father?
It terrified me that Edward might know all my secrets. If he chose to, he could expose me. Hurt me for how I’d hurt him when I’d rejected his affections. People loved a good gruesome rumor. If he revealed that the vilified Dr Moreau’s daughter had murdered her own father, this city’s gossip mills would devour me alive.
I ran numb fingers over my face, thinking. Edward was tied up in all those secrets too. Exposing my secrets would also expose his own – his unnatural origin and his inclination to kill. No, the more I thought about it, the more I was certain it wasn’t my secrets he was after.
Maybe it was my life.
A tingling started deep in my spine. For all I knew, I could be Edward’s next target. He could merely be toying with me, killing those who had wronged me to create a false sense of safety before he struck. After all, I’d rejected his love and then left him for dead. I could hardly expect him to do anything logically. How much control did Edward really have over himself? Where was the line between Beast and man?
Yet if Edward had wanted to kill me, there were far more effective ways. I’d given him a thousand opportunities to strike as I slunk along Shoreditch at night on my way to my secret workshop. And I might have left him for dead, but I’d prevented Montgomery from slitting his throat. I had given him a chance.
So what were these bodies supposed to tell me? If he meant me no harm, why hide behind such macabre gestures of affection?
It’s different with you, Juliet, Edward had said. We belong together.
He’d been wounded before he’d been able to explain what he meant by that plea for help. As I leaned against the brick wall, body ravaged by too many emotions, I wondered if Edward Prince had come back to London with that in mind. Not to destroy my life with rumors, not to claw out my heart, but to confess his love once more.
A hundred uncertainties twisted at my heart. The question was, Who else had to die first? Who else had wronged me? I could give him a list, I thought blackly, starting with Dr Hastings. But I immediately regretted such thoughts. Edward was the murderer, not me. The truth was, he had to be learning about all these people from somewhere. No one knew about Annie stealing that ring except for Lucy. Perhaps she told someone; perhaps Lucy wrote it in a journal that he’d found.
Could he be following Lucy, too?
Before I knew it, my feet were racing along the streets toward Lucy’s neighborhood, throwing glances over my shoulder. I didn’t dare involve her in any of this, and yet I needed to make sure she was safe. Edward could be anywhere. I made my way toward her house in the finest part of town, where the muddy snow had been cleared from the streets. Every manor was stately here, even finer than in the professor’s neighborhood, and each home was decorated for the holidays with mistletoe over the entryway.
Lucy’s family’s mansion was impossible to miss, a four-story red-brick palace on the most prominent corner, by far the grandest house in Belgravia. A wall of perfectly trimmed hedges designed to keep the riffraff out circled the rounded brick turrets. An iron gate opened onto the front walk to the imposing entryway topped with a holiday garland that smelled of pine.
I paused by the gate, casting another cautious glance over my shoulder. The smell took me back to my childhood, when I used to come here for parties. We’d had the most beautiful carriage then. I remembered soft lace curtains and peach upholstery. Montgomery would sit up front with the driver, learning his duties as groomsman, while Mother and Father and I rode in silence in the back until we pulled up at this very gate. Montgomery would take my hand – never meeting my eyes, as a proper young groomsman – and help me down from the carriage. The place beneath my left rib throbbed again at the memory.
A door slammed and a maid appeared in an upstairs window with a rug and duster. I started to pull my hood over my hair and duck away, but I reminded myself that I was once again welcome in this house. The Radcliffes had forbidden Lucy to see me after Father’s scandal, but now that I was ward of the illustrious Professor von Stein, they had no problem smiling at me like nothing had happened. I approached the front door and knocked.
Clara, the maid, answered the door while wiping her hands on a rag. Her face lit up when she saw me. ‘Miss Juliet! What a treat – we haven’t seen you around here much.’ She paused. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, miss. Are you ill?’
I shook my head, though she was closer to the truth than she could imagine. ‘Is Lucy home?’
‘She’s in the salon with her aunt. Shall I tell her you’re here?’
I hesitated. My heart thumped with the need to make certain Lucy was safe. But with her aunt in the room, I wouldn’t be able to speak openly. ‘I didn’t realize she had company. I’d really wanted to speak with her alone. If you’ll just pass along the message that I came, and have her come visit as soon as she can …’
‘Juliet!’ Lucy’s face appeared behind Clara, and she jerked the door open wider. Her frown accused me just as much as the finger pointing at my chest. ‘You’re not leaving without saying hello, are you?’
Her face was so warm and full of life, after those in the basement. ‘If you’ve already got company—’
‘Henry’s here for tea and Aunt Edith is chaperoning. And I’m in desperate need of you, you horrid friend. After you left me alone with John, I practically had to fend him off with an umbrella to keep him from kissing me.’
‘I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll chat then.’
Lucy folded her arms across her chest. ‘I’ve told Henry so much about you that he must believe you’re an imaginary friend I invented out of boredom. The least you could do is have a cup of tea with the poor man.’
At the end of the alley a carriage rumbled by in the direction of Covent Garden. I should be headed there now, to get the latest gossip from Joyce about the murders and see what else I could find out about Scotland Yard’s investigation. But Lucy was narrowing her eyes at me, and I said, ‘All right. Though I can’t stay but a few minutes.’
‘We’ll see about that. And Clara, I came to tell you I’ve eaten all the gingerbread cakes and we need more.’
Lucy linked her arm in mine as she dragged me up the main staircase to the parlor. ‘Thank god the holidays will be over soon, else I’d put on a stone in weight. Oh, I’m so glad you arrived! Henry’s been boring my ears off and I’m desperate for some real conversation. At least he’s nice to look upon.’ She caught herself, and quickly added, ‘Though only in a certain light. Otherwise he’s an ogre.’
We reached the top of the stairs and I tried to brush my hair back and make myself look presentable, when all I could think about was a boy back from the dead.
We entered the parlor, a small but opulent room with a cheerful fire crackling in the ornate fireplace and tea service set out on the low table between the upholstered chairs. Lucy’s aunt, a rather stiff-lipped, dried-out woman, turned when we entered, eyebrows raised at my sudden appearance. Henry was sitting on the sofa with his back to us.
Lucy brushed an errant curl back. ‘Aunt Edith, Henry, I’d like to introduce you to a dear friend. This is Juliet Moreau.’
I dimly heard my name, but for some reason she sounded far away. Henry had turned at the sound of her voice and was staring at us. At me. Suddenly the room felt too small, as though the furniture was pressing in and the fire consuming all the oxygen. He stood slowly to greet us. I was vaguely aware of Lucy’s aunt standing as well, her mouth moving and sound coming out, but she was no more real than a dress shop mannequin. Everything seemed equally unreal, just vague suggestions of furniture and people.
Everything, that was, except for the young man whose gold-flecked eyes met mine.
‘Juliet,’ Lucy said, ‘may I introduce Mr Henry Jakyll.’
He stepped forward to shake my hand.
The faded scar on his right cheek. The face that was so achingly familiar.
The hand extended to me belonged to Edward Prince.
9
The fire stopped crackling. The steam froze in the air. Everything had drifted into a far-off place, shifting into a colorless world like a fading photograph.
Everything but Edward.
Jakyll, I thought. Another false name, just like the other name he’d created – Edward Prince, or rather Prince Edward, a name borrowed from the pages of Shakespeare. Edward didn’t have a given name since he’d never truly been born, but made in a laboratory out of a handful of animal parts. Fox. Heron. Jackal. Of course – that was the source of his false name, a testament to his darker animal side.
The jackal side.
He had changed in the months since I’d seen him. Though the scar under his left eye still marred his face, his features had sharpened in a way that gave him a dramatic, brooding look. His eyes seemed a darker shade of brown – very nearly black – as did his hair. The most shocking change, however, was his size. Never a large young man, he now stood several inches above me and seemed to have put on a stone of muscle.
No wonder Lucy was so taken with him.
I gradually became aware that the room had gone silent and that Aunt Edith and Lucy stared at me expectantly. Edward’s outstretched hand, no longer skeletal but strong, powerful, hiding six-inch-long claws, awaited my own.
I had to make a choice. I could scream. I could tell Lucy and her aunt everything, accuse Edward of being the Wolf of Whitechapel, throw the boiling tea in his face to blind him, and run him through with the poker.
But the hand extended to me wasn’t that of a monster. Edward was split into two selves that shared the same body: one a sharp-clawed monster, the other a tortured young man who wanted nothing more than to be free from his curse. I thought of the little white flower tinged with blood I’d pressed into my journal. A gift from this young man before me, who had once loved me madly.
Well, whatever Edward had felt, it didn’t matter. Everything had changed when I walked into this parlor to discover Edward had involved Lucy in this. He might not intend to harm her, but the Beast could have other plans.
Edward’s throat constricted as he swallowed. I wondered, fleetingly, if he was as thrown off balance by seeing me as I was seeing him.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Jakyll,’ I said at last.
Lucy flopped onto the sofa and reached for her tea. Aunt Edith might have greeted me; I wasn’t sure. If she had, it had been brief and normal, just as though today was any other day and this was any other tea. But it wasn’t any other day. And this wasn’t any young man.
Clara bustled in with a tray of gingerbread cakes. ‘Pardon me, miss,’ she said with a grin, shuffling around me.
I slowly sank onto the sofa next to Lucy, feeling it first with my hands to make sure I wouldn’t miss the seat. Edward sat directly across from me in a dark green velvet chair. My head couldn’t reconcile his presence with Clara’s smile, Lucy’s carefree posture, the sunlight pouring in from the window.
None of them knew they were having tea with the Wolf of Whitechapel.
‘Juliet’s traveled the world as well,’ Lucy said to Edward, throwing her arm casually on the sofa back. ‘Henry’s been all over, knows about practically every country in the world, but you’ll have to forgive him if his customs are strange. He’s from Finland, you know.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Finland.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t bear it,’ Aunt Edith said, brushing a crumb off her dress. ‘All that cold year-round.’
I stared at them as though they spoke a foreign language. Lucy reached for another gingerbread cake and Aunt Edith made a disapproving cough in her throat.
My eyes trailed back to Edward. The last time I’d seen him, blood was pooling beneath his head into fresh straw. Why had I stopped Montgomery from slicing his throat? I wasn’t sure, but it might have had something to do with the look on his face now, somehow innocent despite all his hands had done.
‘I’ve heard quite a bit about you, Henry,’ I said.
The accusation was heavy in my voice, and though the ladies didn’t seem to notice it, Edward did. His eyes searched mine, pleading for forgiveness. How could I forgive him for placing Lucy in danger? For making me care about him when everything had been a lie? For murder?
Edward stood and began to pace as though he needed to stretch his legs, but I recognized that nervous agitation. The Beast was there, lurking just below the surface. ‘Yes, I wondered when we might meet each other,’ he said quietly. ‘From what Lucy has said, we seem to have some interests in common.’
Lucy clapped her hands. ‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you! Henry was interested in something about chemistry … that was it, wasn’t it? I told him you were much better at science than any boy I know.’
Edward’s haunted eyes stayed on me. They said everything his voice couldn’t. He hated his dark other half – the Beast – and the terrible things it led him to do. Even now, his eyes pleaded with me for help.
I couldn’t bear this, having tea with a murderer. All I could think about was the bodies in the morgue. Four people no longer breathed because of him. He’d killed people I cared about, like Alice. Innocent people. And yet, wasn’t I as good as a murderer myself? Father might still be alive if I hadn’t opened that door to his laboratory for Jaguar.
I clutched the sofa’s arm, rubbing my thumb against the rough upholstery seam to stay connected to the present.
Outside, the sun was past its zenith.
‘I should go,’ I choked. Lucy and her aunt looked at me, surprised. ‘I didn’t tell the professor when I’d be home.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Lucy said. ‘You’re not running off without even touching your tea. If the professor is in need of you, I’m certain this is the first place he’ll look. Oh my, Juliet, do you feel all right? You’ve gone pale.’
Aunt Edith said something droll about her own constitution and Lucy answered back smartly, and they started arguing again.
‘Drink some tea, Miss Moreau,’ Edward said quietly. ‘You’ll soon feel better.’
I tried to pick up the delicate cup, but it was like my hands were paws, my fingers too thick. It trembled so badly, I had to set it down.
Edward leaned on the back of the chair opposite me, his dark hair falling over his forehead. ‘Have you seen the hedge maze in the garden, Miss Moreau? There’s a wonderful view from the window.’ His eyes flickered toward the sun-drenched windowpanes. It was a good ten paces from where Lucy and her aunt argued – well out of earshot. He wanted to speak in private. When I hesitated, he leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Please, Juliet.’
There was such tightly controlled desperation in his words that I set down my tea and glanced at Lucy. They were talking of the grand Christmas tree that would soon be delivered in preparation for the masquerade. I stood and walked to the window with unsteady steps, Edward right behind me. It was a beautiful winter’s day outside, the hedges evergreen, not a cloud in the sky.
I kept my voice at a whisper. ‘If you dare to hurt Lucy—’
‘I won’t,’ he said quickly, matching my hushed tone. ‘I would never hurt her. I have some measure of control over—’
‘Henry!’ Lucy called behind us. ‘Henry, come tell Aunt Edith how we met that day in the rain. She wants to hear, and you know I’ve no patience for storytelling.’
His smile to her was artificial, though not unkind. ‘One moment, darling.’
When his eyes returned to mine, the false smile had vanished. ‘I swear to you I mean Lucy no harm. I wouldn’t ever let myself be around her if I thought the Beast might get free. I have a small measure of control over him; not enough to prevent the transformations, nor the crimes he commits, but I can delay them.’
I studied the deep crease in his forehead. I’d spent weeks with Edward at sea and on Father’s island, ignorant of his darker nature, and he had never hurt me, always managing to curb his other half’s cravings until he could release the Beast on some other poor victim. Perhaps he did have some measure of control over his transformations, but all I could picture was the cadaver room full of bodies.
‘How did you escape the island? I thought you were dead.’
‘The Beast is stronger than you think.’ His eyes were hooded, his body tense. ‘I’m trying to cure myself. I’m close.’
Here was the Edward I knew, the young man whose eyes were like a mirror to my own. ‘What kind of cure?’ I whispered, rubbing my own knuckles, which were already beginning to ache.
‘I just need to identify one missing ingredient in the serum. I need a little more time.’
‘You should have come to me sooner.’
‘I didn’t dare involve you. I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid direct contact with you, afraid the Beast might learn some information he could use later to harm you. I’ve settled for slips of news from Lucy. She cares about you a great deal. She speaks of you often.’ His throat tightened. ‘It didn’t mean that I didn’t want to see you. In fact, I wanted to see you quite badly.’
The look in his eyes gave me pause. Nothing of the Beast’s glowing yellow eyes lurked there now, though what I saw frightened me nearly as much.
Desire.
I looked away, wishing my cheeks weren’t turning warm. It seemed Edward’s infatuation with me hadn’t lessened with the passing months.
‘Meet me somewhere,’ I said, quick and low. ‘You must tell me what is going on.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t dare. Not until I’m cured.’
‘I don’t care what you want! People are dying, Edward.’ I darted a glance at Lucy and dropped my voice lower. ‘And we both know exactly who is responsible. I’m already involved, don’t you see? I was involved since the day the sailors pulled you out of the ocean and onto the Curitiba. You must agree to meet me and tell me everything. If you don’t, I’ll expose you. Lucy’s other suitor is the detective leading the investigation of the Wolf of Whitechapel. I can have him here in minutes.’
My heart pounded. I knew, on some deep level, that it was madness even to be talking to Edward. I also knew that, madness or not, Edward’s and my fates were tied together. I was the one threatening to expose him now, but our roles could so easily be reversed.
He took out his gold pocket watch and flipped it open and shut in indecision. At last he closed it and said, ‘Where?’
We needed someplace public enough so that I would be safe alone with him, yet private enough to speak intimately. My mind went back to the island, he and I behind the waterfall, sharing secrets and even a stolen kiss.
‘The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kensington,’ I whispered. ‘The greenhouse. We’ll each leave separately and meet there within an hour.’
He nodded.
The grandfather clock in the study chimed. Aunt Edith stood up and brushed the crumbs off her skirt, missing half of them. ‘Two o’clock already. I’ve got a dinner tonight at the club I must get ready for. Henry, dear, it’s been a pleasure. Won’t you walk me out?’
Edward’s eyes met mine. We were accomplices in this lie now, for better or worse. ‘I’ll be saying good-bye then, Lucy. It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Moreau.’
I hesitated a breath, just long enough to remember his false name.
‘And you, Mr Jakyll.’
10
The parlor door remained open behind them, leaving only the sound of the ticking hallway clock. Henry Jakyll. Edward Prince. One and the same.
‘I’m glad she’s left,’ Lucy said, coming to stand next to me at the window. ‘I think Aunt Edith only ever comes to tea to chastise me for all the things I’ve done wrong.’ She hunted in the fruit bowl on the side table and selected a grape. ‘What did you think of Henry?’ she asked slyly, popping the grape into her mouth. ‘He’s just awful, isn’t he? Didn’t I tell you?’
‘Yes, awful,’ I said carefully, glancing out the window to try to catch a glimpse of him as he left. ‘Not your type at all. Inspector Newcastle is more attractive anyway, don’t you think?’
She frowned, but at that moment I glimpsed Edward and Lucy’s aunt stepping out of the house below, where he helped her into a cabriolet and then started down the street at a fast pace, heading to the botanical gardens for our rendezvous. I looked at the sky, where the sun was already casting shadows. Maybe two hours before sunset. Damn these short winter days. I’d certainly not be able to meet Edward and still have time to rush back home for dinner at the professor’s. He’d be beside himself with worry when I didn’t show up.
Lucy plucked another grape, eyeing me strangely. She changed her mind and set it back down in the bowl. ‘The truth is, and I know this must sound absurd coming from me, but I actually think I might admire him. Not much, of course. Only a tiny bit. Perhaps it’s just stuffy in here.’
I shot her a look. I couldn’t imagine anything that chilled my blood more than the idea of Lucy enamored of a boy with a monstrous other half who had already killed four people in London – for me. I clutched her hand suddenly. ‘He seems a bore to me. I think you should forget him. Really. Now I must go, Lucy. I’m so sorry.’
Her eyes went wide. ‘You’ve only just arrived. I thought we might be able to talk, here, while we’re alone. Didn’t you want to speak to me privately?’ She leaned in, her voice dropping. ‘I have things to tell you, too. I’m not certain Papa’s been fair in his business dealings, and when I mentioned it to Mother, she didn’t seem to care.’
‘Blast, I’m sorry, I really can’t stay to hear about it right now. I’m a terrible friend, I know, but I really must go.’ I paused in the doorway. ‘Oh, and I forgot to tell you – Inspector Newcastle is going to propose. I thought you should know. And I really don’t think he’s that terrible; perhaps you should give him a chance.’
I squeezed her hand and hurried from the room and down the stairs, waving to Clara as I ran out into the street.
Guilt gripped me for leaving her so suddenly, but part of this was for Lucy. I could hardly explain that her suitor – who she actually fancied – had a murderous other side to him, and it was either cure him, kill him, or have her end up dead.
A chill was settling into the shadows of buildings as late afternoon approached. I turned toward the sun in the west, in the direction of the Royal Botanical Gardens, where palm trees stood like ghosts within the captive heat of the greenhouse.
A thousand places to kill. A million reasons not to trust.
I started running toward Kensington.
My feet ached by the time I arrived. The tired-looking ticket collector glanced at his pocket watch.
‘Palm House closes at sunset, the gardens at six. You have but a few hours.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said breathlessly, shoving my coins at him. I dashed through the gardens to the bridge that stretched across the frozen lake. From there, I could see the greenhouse, where rays of light caught on the thousands of glass panels.
I felt as though I’d crossed some invisible boundary and was no longer in London. Gone were the city crowds, the smoke and the soot, the noise of carriages and yelling street vendors.
I took a deep breath and pushed open the Palm House’s ironwork door. A flood of warmth escaped the crack, filling my lungs with steam as I entered the domed central atrium.
I slid out of my coat and left it hanging over a branch, then fumbled to open the top buttons of my dress. Sweat was already forming on my inner layers. Somewhere, the line between this world and another blurred.
I was back in the jungle.
The hiss of steam jets replaced the ocean tides. Machinery squealed like jungle birds. Steam filled my lungs with memories: Jaguar, with his flicking tail; the smell of burning refuse and unwashed animals in the islanders’ village; the salt in the breeze. In a strange way I missed the island terribly, heartsick for a place I’d hated and a father I’d wanted to die.
No – a father I’d helped murder.
‘Edward?’ I called as loud as I dared, uncertain if it was an enormous mistake to have come here.
A chain rattled overhead. Iron catwalks spanned the ceiling so visitors could walk among the treetops. A well-dressed figure now descended the spiral staircase. Edward. He stopped a few feet from me, as quiet as the steam at our feet.
‘Hello, Juliet.’
Being here, in this place so reminiscent of the island, I felt beastly things stir inside of me, taking me back to the island where we had learned to move through the trees quiet as animals, where he’d kissed me behind the waterfall. My pulse quickened, hungry for those things again despite my better sense.
He stepped forward, toying with his gold pocket watch, and I stepped back. ‘I told you, for the time being I’m still stronger than him. I can fight him if I feel him coming on. I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘What about that thief girl, and Annie, and the others? You were quick enough to kill them.’
‘I’m sorry for them, truly. When the Beast takes over, I lose myself to him.’
‘Why only kill people who have done wrong to me?’
A flicker of confusion passed over his features. ‘You’ll have to ask the Beast that question; he’s the one who chose them.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘He seems to know my memories, but I only share pieces of his. The next day I find newspaper headlines about three slashes to the chest, and I assume he was responsible. I knew the solicitor was an acquaintance of yours, but not the others. I had assumed they were random.’
‘Hardly. Each one of them committed a crime against me.’
Edward’s face softened. ‘That explains it, then. I hadn’t realized why he was so intent on those particular kills. He’s trying to protect you, in his own way.’
‘Protect me? Why?’
He regarded me strangely for the space of a few breaths, while I wondered if I was crazy to be here and not to try to kill him on sight. He said, ‘Because he’s as much in love with you as I am.’
My lips parted, though no words came. I paced over a path between soft spring-green ferns, trying to process everything. Emotions had never come easy to me, and they now threaded themselves in knots I couldn’t possibly unravel. ‘Killing is a choice. Can’t he just stop?’
‘You wouldn’t ask that question if you understood how powerful he is. He’d like to kill everyone who crosses his path, but he’s tried to restrain himself and, I suppose, kill only those who sought to harm you.’ He paused. ‘I try to keep him contained – look.’
His wiry fingers went to his shirt cuff. I couldn’t help but notice how his knuckles were swollen and knobby, so like my own when a bout of illness was coming on. He unbuttoned his cuff and rolled back his sleeve over his forearm, revealing dark bruises.
I gasped. The bruises ranged from dark blue to purple to a yellowing gray, a rainbow of pain. I could barely tear my eyes off their strange beauty when he reached for his shirt buttons. ‘I chain myself if I feel him coming out, but sometimes I’m not fast enough, or he breaks the lock.’ He opened his shirt to reveal his bare chest. Welts and bruises slashed his skin. I traced them with my eyes, entranced.
I swallowed. ‘Edward …’
He pulled his shirt back on and rolled down the sleeves. ‘I’m showing you because I want you to understand the lengths I’ll go to in order to cure myself. I don’t want to hurt anyone else, you least of all. I was as surprised as you were when you walked into Lucy’s parlor today. I knew you two were very close, but if I had known you were coming by, I’d never have gone.’
‘What are you doing with her?’ I asked. ‘You shouldn’t ever have introduced yourself to her. And now she’s practically ready to run away with you – what kind of madness is this?’
‘An act, nothing more,’ he said, taking an uncertain step toward me. ‘She’s a fine young woman, but I’m only posing as her suitor to get closer to her father. Juliet, I couldn’t ever love anyone besides—’
‘Stop,’ I said, throwing up a hand. ‘Please, Edward, don’t talk like that.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Why do you want to get close to Mr Radcliffe?’
He ran a hand through his hair. ‘It’s part of the plan to cure myself. I have letters that I took from your father’s laboratory before it burned. They contain correspondence with a former colleague of his, going back years to when he was first banished. All that time on the island, he maintained contact with someone, trading the secrets to his work in exchange for funding and supplies.’
His words gave me pause. All those years when I’d thought Father dead, he was corresponding with someone back in London? I sank against the rough bark of a palm tree to steady myself. I’d once asked Father why he never wrote to me. He’d alluded to the fact that there was a warrant on him, and letters would have alerted the police to his whereabouts. And yet it seemed he hadn’t hesitated to write to colleagues when it suited him.
I started to put everything together. ‘The letters were to Mr Radcliffe? Lucy’s father was his correspondent? But he isn’t a scientist. Their money came from rail, and now he’s doing something with the automobile industry, shipping engines all over Europe—’
Edward was quick to shake his head. ‘I don’t know for sure if it’s him. The letters aren’t signed; whoever his colleague was, Moreau wished to keep it secret. The correspondent called himself a King’s Man, nothing more. So I’ve been investigating all the members of the King’s Club, starting with those closest to your father, such as Radcliffe. He’s a hard man to get close to.’
‘The King’s Club is wrapped up in this?’ My mind ticked back to the grainy old photograph hanging in the hallways of King’s College. Father’s young face had seemed so hopeful then, brimming with ambition. I tried to remember the other faces. Hastings had been there, and Isambard Lessing … the rest of the names bled together in my head.
‘So you used Lucy. Never mind that you would only end up breaking her heart, assuming you didn’t first rip it out of her chest.’ I knew my words were laced with acid, but he didn’t flinch. ‘Did you at least discover anything about her father?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet. There are a dozen King’s Men who fit the profile.’ A shadow passed through the golden flecks in his eyes. ‘Including your guardian.’
My hand fell away from my collar. The professor? Words raced up my throat, ready to deny it, but they never made it to my lips. Doubts started to pull them back down – the professor had been in the photograph, standing right next to my father, of all places – but I gritted my teeth and ignored my doubts. ‘The professor was the one who turned Father in. He’d never support his work.’
But Edward didn’t answer, and my blood went cold. Only the day before yesterday the professor had told me about how he’d met Father in the King’s Club. He’d prodded me for information, asked me to talk about my time on the island. I thought he’d just been concerned …
I shook my head fiercely. ‘No, I don’t believe it. It’s someone else. But it doesn’t matter – whoever Father’s secret colleague is, you can’t contact him. It’s too dangerous.’
‘I haven’t a choice. If he knows Moreau’s work, he might know how to cure me.’
‘He’ll use you! On the island Montgomery and I swore we wouldn’t let any of my father’s research leave, in case the wrong people were to get ahold of it. That’s the entire reason I destroyed his laboratory, the reason I wouldn’t let Balthazar come back with me … the reason I helped kill my own father!’
My desperate words filled the artificial jungle around us, and I clenched my jaw as if I could take them back.
‘I’m flesh and blood, not a diagram in a laboratory notebook,’ Edward said. ‘How could they possibly use me?’
‘It wouldn’t be impossible for someone with the right training. I saw a hybridized Bourgogne lily the other day and knew exactly what stock it had come from. If I’d been able to dissect it and further examine its various parts, I’d be able to tell even more.’ My voice fell to a whisper. ‘They could do the same to you, Edward. Cut you open and see how Father made you, and then re-create it. Think of what that would mean. How many animals would die on their operating tables. Humans, too, probably. And in the end, an army of beast-men not contained on a single small island.’
His hand touched the scar under his eye absently and then fell away. ‘What other choice do I have? As long as the Beast is a part of me, he’ll keep killing. That blood is on my hands too, Juliet. I’ve no one else to help me.’
A thousand emotions warred in my chest. Some told me to run, some told me our goals were the same – finding a cure – and that we could help each other. Some told me to leave him to his fate. But it was my fate too, now. I’d had a hand in my own father’s murder to keep this from happening. And I wasn’t a fool. If Father’s colleague got his hands on Edward, it would only be a matter of time before he found out I, too, was one of Father’s experiments. If I wasn’t careful, it might be me strapped to an operating table one day.
I cursed under my breath, wondering if I was making a huge mistake.
‘Then I’ll help you myself.’
11
Later that evening, Edward and I stood on the landing of my lodging house in Shoreditch while I fumbled with the key. Sharkey had been waiting outside the front door, half-hidden in the bushes, having escaped Joyce again and come here, where he knew I’d give him whatever meat scraps I had left over from my experiments. I’d introduced the dog to Edward and he’d carried Sharkey up the stairs in his arms. Seeing him act so gentle with the little mutt stirred something inside me.
For months I’d thought Edward was dead, though that hadn’t kept my mind from straying back to him. Edward had been a friend, possibly even something more, before I’d learned the terrible truth about the monster inside him. I think I would have felt more outrage if he hadn’t died. But in death I had absolved him of his crimes, blaming my father instead for having created him, and I had absolved myself of blame, too, for not seeing through his lies earlier. But here he was, very much alive, responsible for a string of violent murders, and yet also very much just a boy learning what it meant to be human. Almost all he knew of the world he’d learned from books; the sights and smells of the city – even something as common as a street dog – must be a revelation to him.
I turned the lock and pushed open the door. This place was more than a workshop; it was my retreat from fine china and straight-backed chairs and weak tasteless tea. I liked coming here alone, where I could hide from the world, tucked under the patchwork quilt. I had worried that by bringing Edward here, that precious balance would be upset. But as I watched him rubbing Sharkey’s head and leaning against the rough wood of the stairwell, he seemed to fit so naturally.
‘Come inside,’ I said softly. ‘No one knows about this place. You’ll be well hidden here.’
It took a lot for me to say that – to invite a murderer into my one private space. But in a twist of fate, watching him shift the dog from one arm to the other and brush back a loose strand of hair, I felt strangely safe with him.
Safe with a murderer. With Edward. Perhaps this was how madness started.
Sharkey jumped out of his arms and curled up by the bricks around the woodstove. Edward came in hesitantly, scratching the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable in a lady’s room. I lit the lamp and nodded toward the woodstove. ‘Will you light the fire? I’ll put the kettle on.’
He bent to swing open the iron grate and add wood to the stove. While his back was turned, I chewed on a fingernail and tried not to steal glances at his frame, so much stronger than I’d remembered. Having him here triggered so many memories. A sun-scarred castaway on the Curitiba’s deck, clutching a crumpled photograph. A boy holding me close in a cave behind a waterfall. The one person in addition to me who wasn’t afraid to stand up to my father, when even Montgomery wouldn’t.
My left rib started to ache at the painful memories. Montgomery had the strength of a horse, and yet he’d been powerless in front of my father. I remembered being a little girl and listening through the laboratory keyhole as Father taught Montgomery how the circulatory system worked. It had hurt then, too, that Father was closer to a servant boy than to his own daughter. Perhaps I shouldn’t have blamed Montgomery. He’d had no other family; his father was a Dutch sailor he’d never known, his mother died when he was barely five, no siblings, no other servants his age. Of course he’d fallen under the spell of Father’s charms; any child that lonely would crave a connection wherever he could get it.
And yet I offered him love, I thought blackly. I chose him, but he didn’t choose me.
Edward closed the grate and rubbed his hands together in front of the fire with a boyish grin. I didn’t even consider trying to smile back. My heart was too shaken.
‘Where did you get those clothes?’ I asked. ‘They aren’t cheap, and neither is that gold pocket watch.’
He came to the cabinet, where the lantern tossed pools of light over his face. ‘The Beast keeps a room at a brothel in Soho – I wake there sometimes. He steals clothes and things from the wealthy patrons, always finds men close to my size … very thoughtful of the Beast.’ The hints of a smile played on his mouth.
‘This isn’t a joking matter.’
He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t mean to make light of it. I’ve been staying in the Beast’s room and selling the stolen goods. I know it’s hardly proper, but a brothel’s good cover – I don’t know where else to go. People tend to overlook the screaming when I transform …’
I shuddered at the thought. ‘You can’t go back there,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later one of the patrons will report the thefts, and if Scotland Yard comes to investigate and catches you, it’ll be all over the newspapers, and not long before Father’s mystery colleague gets his hands on you.’ I nodded toward the bed, looking away before my cheeks warmed. ‘You can stay here.’
He nodded, and silence fell around us. He took out his pocket watch, toying with it just to fill the quiet. He wandered to the worktable, where I’d left the laboratory equipment in perfect order, the boiler and beakers and glass vials arranged in descending order of height. It wasn’t a vial he reached for, though, but one of the grafted rosebushes. I’d bound a single white rose to a bush of red, and he touched it as gently as a caress.
‘You made these?’
I didn’t answer, afraid he’d point out how similar the grafting and splicing was to Father’s work, and how the placement of my laboratory equipment mirrored Father’s exactly.
‘Yes,’ I said at last.
‘They’re beautiful.’
A surge of pride swelled in my heart. The kettle started whistling, and I nearly tripped over the dog to fetch it, along with my single mug. I poured a cup and handed it to him, trying not to think about his compliment. ‘I’m not used to guests here. I’ve only the one cup.’
‘Much obliged,’ he said, taking the tea, and only then acknowledged the medical equipment. ‘And all of this?’
‘I have to have it,’ I said quickly. ‘The serum I take is failing. Father designed it for me when I was a baby, and as I get older, it’s less effective. I’m trying to cure myself, just like you are.’ I let my hand fall over a crystal beaker. ‘That’s why I offered to help you.’
‘Have you had any success?’
‘Not yet,’ I said, though my voice caught as my eyes fell on the cupboard shelf. A book glowed there in the faint lantern light. It was one of many books I kept on anatomy, and botany, and philosophy, but this one was special. It stood out like a temptation, or maybe an accusation.
It was my father’s journal.
I’d found it the day after Montgomery set me adrift from the island. He must have stowed it in the dinghy along with the water and food and other supplies. For a while, I had resisted opening it. And yet once I discovered that Father’s serum was failing me, the temptation to look had been too strong. I had opened that leather cover and read his notes – some scrawled, most in his painstakingly precise handwriting. I’d flipped through the pages, desperate for some clues about how to cure myself. And yet the journal hadn’t proven anything, half of it little more than lines of nonsense words and numbers strung together.
I touched the journal delicately, but didn’t dare pull it out. ‘Father made most of his notations in here, before he transferred everything to the files he kept in his laboratory. There’s a formula for my serum, and the one he used on the islanders, and I’ve been trying to adapt it to my current situation.’ I let my hand fall away from the book. ‘No luck so far. Much of what he says in there is nonsense, anyway. He must have used a personal shorthand when he was writing in a hurry, and I haven’t been able to make sense of it.’
Edward’s eyes didn’t leave the journal. When he spoke, his voice held a quiet sort of hope. ‘Does it say anything about me? He used cellular traits from human blood to make me. I never found out whose blood it was.’
His fingers were still flipping the pocket watch over nervously, and I understood. To Edward it wasn’t just blood in a test tube. That human blood was his only tie to another person – to a family, in a sense.
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t say. I’m sorry.’
He turned to the chemistry set, looking through my beakers and vials of supplies. Science, math, literature – these were the things Edward was comfortable with, things easily learned from a book. He made a good show at social interaction, using lines and scenes from obscure plays no one knew, but I didn’t think it ever came naturally to him.
‘We can figure it out together,’ I said softly. ‘We’ll cure both of us. It’ll just take time.’
‘Time is something I don’t have much of, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The longer I’m with the Beast, the more alike we become. I can feel him bleeding into me, trying to take over. I can still delay the transformations, but I’m not sure for how much longer. He could only hold his form minutes at first, a half hour at most. Now he can hold it for two hours.’ His eyes met mine over the flickering burner flame, and again I thought about how much darker they looked. ‘In another month, maybe less, I’m afraid he’ll take over completely.’
My lips parted. This was why he seemed bigger to me, and darker, and stronger. The Beast was melding with him. ‘Edward …’
‘I can’t let it get to that, Juliet. He’ll terrorize everything. If he would let me take my own life, I would. I’ve tried a dozen times, but he prevents me.’ He paused. ‘Montgomery nearly killed me, once.’ He looked away from the flame. ‘You shouldn’t have stopped him.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I whispered.
His flickering eyes found mine. ‘You know it’s the only possible end for me. I was never meant to exist.’
‘But you do exist, Edward. We’ll find the missing ingredient, and we’ll get rid of the Beast.’ I realized how desperate my voice sounded. Desperate for him, or desperate for me, now that I had someone in my life who shared my secrets?
‘Juliet …,’ he muttered, and brushed the back of his hand against my cheek.
Warmth bloomed where he touched me. For an instant I leaned into it, as starved for human contact as he was, and wicked temptations whispered in my head before I could twist away in shock at my own response. I was lonely, that was all, especially for someone I could talk to freely.
He killed Alice, I reminded myself, thinking of my father’s sweet young maid. He could kill you, if you get too close.
‘How did you survive the fire?’ I asked, as though we could pretend that touch had never happened.
‘The Beast is strong. He heals fast. I came to and was able to crawl out before the barn collapsed, and then I salvaged what I could from the house. The letters, for one.’
‘I want to see these letters.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll go back to the brothel and collect them. I must return anyway for the chains I use to bind myself and some changes of clothes.’
I chewed on a fingernail, pacing. ‘I want to help you, Edward, truly, but not if …’ I swallowed, thinking of those drained bodies. ‘Not if you keep killing people.’
‘I’ll fetch the chains in the morning. He’s weaker early in the day. If he has the choice, he prefers to emerge at nighttime.’
‘And tonight? Can you promise me no one else will die tonight?’
A flash of Annie Benton’s face, Sir Danvers Carew, the red-haired thief girl.
Edward went to my worktable and searched through the vials, coming back with a heavy dose of sedative. ‘Give me this, then,’ he said.
‘That much could kill you.’
‘You underestimate how strong I’ve gotten. It’s only for one night. Tomorrow I’ll have the chains.’ He held it out to me, and I took it hesitantly. I’d gotten it from a veterinarian who had told me it was used to sedate animals for transportation. If it would stop a lion, it would stop Edward.
‘Give me your arm,’ I said. ‘You’ll fall asleep in ten minutes, twenty at most.’ He held it out to me and I inserted the needle into a vein, telling myself there was no choice, that I was doing this so we wouldn’t wake up to any more bloody headlines in the newspaper. I rolled his sleeve back down gently. ‘One more thing. Promise me you won’t see Lucy again. You’re putting her in danger by being around her.’
He nodded a little hesitantly. ‘I’ll send her a note.’
I felt the weight of the unfinished conversation and finally asked the question that kept circling in my thoughts.
‘What happened to Montgomery?’
There was the pain again, sharp and quick, in my side, as though when Montgomery had shoved the dinghy away with his boot, he’d kicked my heart instead. I recapped the syringe, biting the inside of my cheek.
Edward didn’t respond right away, and my mind filled with answers he wasn’t saying. Perhaps he’d killed Montgomery, or one of the beast-men had. Or Montgomery was still there, on the island, content never to see me again.
‘He’s alive,’ Edward said at last, but I could tell he was holding something back. ‘He hunted me for weeks on the island. I left him notes, trying to get him to give me a chance to explain … I thought maybe he could help me find a cure. But he was only interested in hunting me down, and I knew sooner or later he’d have his chance, and he wouldn’t win. The Beast is too strong. So I left, to come here and find a cure before my other half killed him.’
I toyed with one of the silver forks in the pile of stolen silverware, watching the glints from the lantern. He stepped closer, dropping his voice. ‘Forget him, Juliet. He abandoned you. He was keeping secrets from you.’
I glanced up from the fork. ‘Secrets?’
‘That he was helping your father, that he’d made some of the creatures himself, and worst of all …’ He stopped and looked away.
‘What secret?’ I asked. When he didn’t answer, I let the fork clatter to the floor and grabbed his suit lapel a little roughly. ‘What other secret was Montgomery keeping from me, Edward?’
‘It doesn’t matter. You loved him, and he left you. I’d never do that to you. I’d sooner cut off my own hand than do anything to cause you pain.’ My fingers were still coiled in the stiff fabric of his lapel, and he whispered, ‘If you’d only give me a chance …’
But I stepped back toward the cabinet, away from his promises and his offers. My breath was coming fast. The world was an upside-down place when Montgomery James was keeping secrets from me and Edward Prince telling me the truth.
But Edward was right – Montgomery had lied to me. He had left me.
I grabbed my coat before he could say another word, and said, ‘The professor will have half the city out looking for me. It’s so late … I must get back. I’ll leave Sharkey here with you; the drugs will put you to sleep in a few minutes, so lock the door behind me. If you aren’t too groggy tomorrow, go through Father’s journal – maybe you can make sense of it. I’ll come back tomorrow night with fresh supplies.’ I squeezed the doorknob, afraid to let go. Terrified to leave him, terrified that I still might read of fresh murders tomorrow in the newspaper. Sedatives might not be enough. Chains might not be enough. I had seen what the Beast could do. I’d have to make something even stronger to contain him until we could find the cure.
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Megan Shepherd
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this tantalizing sequel to Megan Shepherd′s gothic suspense novel, The Madman′s Daughter, explores the hidden natures of those we love and how far we′ll go to save them from themselves.To defeat the darkness, she must first embrace it.Back in London after her trip to Dr. Moreau′s horrific island, Juliet is rebuilding the life she once knew and trying to forget her father′s legacy. But soon it′s clear that someone – or something – hasn′t forgotten her, as people close to Juliet start falling victim to a murderer who leaves a macabre calling card of three clawlike slashes. Has one of her father′s creations also escaped the island?As Juliet strives to stop a killer while searching for a serum to cure her own worsening illness, she finds herself once more in a world of scandal and danger. Her heart torn in two, past bubbling to the surface, life threatened by an obsessive killer – Juliet will be lucky to escape alive.