Kitabı oku: «The Madman’s Daughter»
MEGAN SHEPHERD
The Madman’s Daughter
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
To Jesse – I love you, madly.
ONE
The basement hallways in King’s College of Medical Research were dark, even in the daytime.
At night they were like a grave.
Rats crawled through corridors that dripped with cold perspiration. The chill in the sunken rooms kept the specimens from rotting and numbed my own flesh, too, through the worn layers of my dress. When I cleaned those rooms, late at night after the medical students had gone home to their warm beds, the sound of my hard-bristle brush echoed in the operating theater, down the twisting halls, into the storage spaces where they kept the things of nightmares. Other people’s nightmares, that is. Dead flesh and sharpened scalpels didn’t bother me. I was my father’s daughter, after all. My nightmares were made of darker things.
My brush paused against the mortar, frozen by a familiar sound from down the hall: the unwelcome tap-tap-tap of footsteps that meant Dr Hastings had stayed late. I scrubbed harder, furiously, but blood had a way of seeping into the tiles so not even hours of work could get them clean.
The footsteps came closer until they stopped right behind me.
‘How’s it coming, then, Juliet?’ His warm breath brushed the back of my neck.
Keep your eyes down, I told myself, scouring the bloodstained squares of mortar so hard that my own knuckles bled.
‘Well, Doctor.’ I kept it short, hoping he would leave, but he didn’t.
Overhead the electric bulbs snapped and clicked. I glanced at the silver tips of his shoes, so brightly polished that I could see the reflection of his balding scalp and milky eyes watching me. He wasn’t the only professor who worked late, or the only one whose gaze lingered too long on my bent-over backside. But the smell of lye and other chemicals on my clothes deterred the others. Dr Hastings seemed to relish it.
He slipped his pale fingers around my wrist. I dropped the brush in surprise. ‘Your knuckles are bleeding,’ he said, pulling me to my feet.
‘It’s the cold. It chaps my skin.’ I tried to tug my hand back, but he held firm. ‘It’s nothing.’
His eyes followed the sleeve of my muslin dress to the stained apron and frayed hem, a dress that not even my father’s poorest servants would have worn. But that was many years ago, when we lived in the big house on Belgrave Square, where my closet burst with furs and silks and soft lacy things I’d worn only once or twice, since Mother threw out the previous year’s fashions like bathwater.
That was before the scandal.
Now, men seldom looked at my clothes for long. When a girl fell from privilege, men were less interested in her ratty skirts than in what lay underneath, and Dr Hastings was no different. His eyes settled on my face. My friend Lucy told me I looked like the lead actress at the Brixton, a Frenchwoman with high cheekbones and skin pale as bone, even paler against the dark, straight hair she wore swept up in a Swiss-style chignon. I kept my own hair in a simple braid, though a few strands always managed to slip out. Dr Hastings reached up to tuck them behind my ear, his fingers rough as parchment against my temple. I cringed inside but fought to keep my face blank. Better to give no reaction so he wouldn’t be encouraged. But my shaking hands betrayed me.
Dr Hastings smiled thinly. The tip of his tongue snaked out from between his lips.
Suddenly the sound of groaning hinges made him startle. My heart pounded wildly at this chance to slip away. Mrs Bell, the lead maid, stuck her gray head through the cracked door. Her mouth curved in its perpetual frown as her beady eyes darted between the professor and me. I’d never been so glad to see her wrinkled face.
‘Juliet, out with you,’ she barked. ‘Mary’s gone and broken a lamp, and we need another set of hands.’
I stepped away from Dr Hastings, relief rolling off me like a cold sweat. My eyes met Mrs Bell’s briefly as I slipped into the hall. I knew that look. She couldn’t watch out for me all the time.
One day, she might not be there to intercede.
The moment I was free of those dark hallways, I dashed into the street toward Covent Garden as the moon hovered low over London’s skyline. The harsh wind bit at my calves through worn wool stockings as I waited for a carriage to pass. Across the street a figure stood in the lee of the big wooden bandstand’s staircase.
‘You awful creature,’ Lucy said, slipping out of the shadows. She hugged the collar of her fur coat around her long neck. Her cheeks and nose were red beneath a light sheen of French powder. ‘I’ve been waiting an hour.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I leaned in and pressed my cheek to hers. Her parents would be horrified to know she had snuck out to meet me. They had encouraged our friendship when Father was London’s most famous surgeon, but were quick to forbid her to see me after his banishment.
Luckily for me, Lucy loved to disobey.
‘They’ve had me working late all week opening up some old rooms,’ I said. ‘I’ll be cleaning cobwebs out of my hair for days.’
She pretended to pluck something distasteful from my hair and grimaced. We both laughed. ‘Honestly, I don’t know how you can stand that work, with the rats and beetles and, my God, whatever else lurks down there.’ Her blue eyes gleamed mischievously. ‘Anyway, come on. The boys are waiting.’ She snatched my hand, and we hurried across the courtyard to a redbrick building with a stone staircase. Lucy banged the horse-head knocker twice.
The door swung open, and a young man with thick chestnut hair and a fine suit appeared. He had Lucy’s same fair skin and wide-set eyes, so this must be the cousin she’d told me about. I timidly evaluated his tall forehead, the helix of his ears that projected only a hair too far from the skull. Good-looking, I concluded. He studied me wordlessly in return, in my third-hand coat, with worn elbows and frayed satin trim, that must have looked so out of place next to Lucy’s finely tailored one. But to his credit, his grin didn’t falter for a moment. She must have warned him she was bringing a street urchin and not to say anything rude.
‘Let us in, Adam,’ Lucy said, pushing past him. ‘My toes are freezing to the street.’
I slipped in behind her. Shrugging off her coat, she said, ‘Adam, this is the friend I’ve told you about. Not a penny to her name, can’t cook, but God, just look at her.’
My face went red, and I shot Lucy a withering look, but Adam only smiled. ‘Lucy’s nothing if not blunt,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m used to it. I’ve heard far worse come out of her mouth. And she’s right, at least about the last part.’
I jerked my head toward him, expecting a leer. But he was being sincere, which only left me feeling more at a loss for words.
‘Where are they?’ Lucy asked, ignoring us. A bawdy roar spilled from a back room, and Lucy grinned and headed toward the sound. I expected Adam to follow her. But his gaze found me instead. He smiled again.
Startled, I paused a second too long. This was new. No vulgar winks, no glances at my chest. I was supposed to say something pleasant. But instead I drew a breath in, like a secret I had to keep close. I knew how to handle cruelty, not kindness.
‘May I take your coat?’ he asked. I realized I had my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, though it was pleasantly warm inside the house.
I forced my arms apart and slid the coat off. ‘Thank you.’ My voice was barely audible.
We followed Lucy down the hall to a sitting room where a group of lanky medical students reclined on leather sofas, sipping glasses of honey-colored liquid. Winter examinations had just ended, and they were clearly deep into their celebration. This was the kind of thing Lucy adored – breaking up a boys’ club, drinking gin and playing cards and reveling in their shocked faces. She got away with it under the pretense of visiting her cousin, though this was a far step from the elderly aunt’s parlor where Lucy was supposed to be meeting him.
Adam stepped forward to join the crowd, laughing at something someone said. I tried to feel at ease in the unfamiliar crowd, too aware of my shabby dress and chapped hands. Smile, Mother would have whispered. You belonged among these people, once. But first I needed to gauge how drunk they were, the lay of the room, who was most likely not to laugh at my poor clothes. Analyzing, always analyzing – I couldn’t feel safe until I knew every aspect of what I was facing.
Mother had been so confident around other people, always able to talk about the church sermon that morning, about the rising price of coffee. But I’d taken after my father when it came to social situations. Awkward. Shy. More apt to study the crowd like some social experiment than to join in.
Lucy had tucked herself on the sofa between a blond-haired boy and one with a face as red as an apple. A half-empty rum bottle dangled from her graceful fingers. When she saw me hanging back in the doorway, she stood and sauntered over.
‘The sooner you find a husband,’ she growled playfully, ‘the sooner you can stop scrubbing floors. So pick one of them and say something charming.’
I swallowed. My eyes drifted to Adam. ‘Lucy, men like these don’t marry girls like me.’
‘You haven’t the faintest idea what men want. They don’t want some snobbish porridge-faced brat plucking at needlepoint all day.’
‘Yes, but I’m a maid.’
‘A temporary situation.’ She waved it away, as if my last few years of backbreaking work were nothing more than a lark. She jabbed me in the side. ‘You come from money. From class. So show a little.’
She held the bottle out to me. I wanted to tell her that sipping rum straight from a bottle wasn’t exactly showing class, but I’d only earn myself another jab.
I glanced at Adam. I’d never been good at guessing people’s feelings. I had to study their reactions instead. And in this situation, it didn’t take much to conclude I wasn’t what these men wanted, despite Lucy’s insistence.
But maybe I could pretend to be. Hesitantly, I took a sip.
The blond boy tugged Lucy to the sofa next to him. ‘You must help us end a debate, Miss Radcliffe. Cecil says the human body contains 210 bones, and I say 211.’
Lucy batted her pretty lashes. ‘Well, I’m sure I don’t know.’
I sighed and leaned into the doorframe.
The boy took her chin in his hand. ‘If you’ll be so good as to hold still, I’ll count, and we can find our answer.’ He touched a finger to her skull. ‘One.’ I rolled my eyes as the boy dropped his finger lower, to her shoulder bones. ‘Two. And three.’ His finger ran slowly, seductively, along her clavicle. ‘Four.’ Then his finger traced even lower, to the thin skin covering her breastbone. ‘Five,’ he said, so drawn out that I could smell the rum on his breath.
I cleared my throat. The other boys watched, riveted, as the boy’s finger drifted lower and lower over Lucy’s neckline. Why not just skip the pretense and grab her breast? Lucy was no better, giggling like she was enjoying it. Exasperated, I slapped his pasty hand off her chest.
The whole room went still.
‘Wait your turn, darling,’ the boy said, and they all laughed. He turned back to Lucy, holding up that ridiculous finger.
‘206,’ I said.
This got their attention. Lucy took the bottle from my hand and fell back against the leather sofa with an exasperated sigh.
‘I beg your pardon?’ the boy said.
‘206,’ I repeated, feeling my cheeks warm. ‘There are 206 bones in the body. I would think, as a medical student, you would know that.’
Lucy’s head shook at my hopelessness, but her lips cracked in a smile regardless. The blond boy’s mouth went slack.
I continued before he could think. ‘If you doubt me, tell me how many bones are in the human hand.’ The boys took no offense at my remark. On the contrary, they seemed all the more drawn to me for it. Maybe I was the kind of girl they wanted, after all.
Lucy’s only acknowledgment was an approving tip of the rum bottle in my direction.
‘I’ll take that wager,’ Adam interrupted, leveling his handsome green eyes at me.
Lucy jumped up and wrapped her arm around my shoulders. ‘Oh, good! And what’s the wager, then? I’ll not have Juliet risk her reputation for less than a kiss.’
I immediately turned red, but Adam only grinned. ‘My prize, if I am right, shall be a kiss. And if I am wrong—’
‘If you are wrong’ – I interjected, feeling reckless; I grabbed the rum from Lucy and tipped the bottle back, letting the liquid warmth chase away my insecurity – ‘you must call on me wearing a lady’s bonnet.’
He walked around the sofa and took the bottle. The confidence in his step told me he didn’t intend to lose. He set the bottle on the side table and skimmed his forefinger tantalizingly along the delicate bones in the back of my hand. I parted my lips, curling my toes to keep from jerking my hand away. This wasn’t Dr Hastings, I told myself. Adam was hardly shoving his hand down my neckline. It was just an innocent touch.
‘Twenty-four,’ he said.
I felt a triumphant swell. ‘Wrong. Twenty-seven.’ Lucy gave my leg a pinch and I remembered to smile. This was supposed to be flirtatious. Fun.
Adam’s eyes danced devilishly. ‘And how would a girl know such things?’
I straightened. ‘Whether I’m right or wrong has nothing to do with gender.’ I paused. ‘Also, I’m right.’
Adam smirked. ‘Girls don’t study science.’
My confidence faltered. I knew how many bones there were in the human hand because I was my father’s daughter. When I was a child, Father would give physiology lessons to our servant boy, Montgomery, to spite those who claimed the lower classes were incapable of learning. He considered women naturally deficient, however, so I would hide in the laboratory closet during lessons, and Montgomery would slip me books to study. But I could hardly tell these young men that. Every medical student knew the name Moreau. They would remember the scandal.
Lucy jumped to my defense. ‘Juliet knows more than the lot of you. She works in the medical building. She’s probably spent more time around cadavers than you lily spirits.’
I gritted my teeth, wishing she hadn’t told them. It was one thing to be a maid, another to clean the laboratory after their botched surgeries. But Adam arched an eyebrow, interested.
‘Is that so? Well then, I have a different wager for you, miss.’ His eyes danced with something more dangerous than a kiss. ‘I have a key to the college, and you must know your way around. Let’s find one of your skeletons and count for ourselves.’
Glances darted among the other boys like sparks in a fire. They prodded one another, goading each other on in anticipation of the idea of a clandestine trip into the bowels of the medical building.
Lucy gave me an impish shrug. ‘Why not?’
I hesitated. I’d spent enough time in those dank halls. There was a darkness there that had worked its way into the hollow spaces between my bones. A darkness that clung to the hallways like my father’s shadow, smelling of formaldehyde and his favorite apricot preserves. Tonight was supposed to be about escaping the darkness – if not in the arms of a future husband, at least in a few lighthearted moments.
I shook my head.
But the boys had made up their minds, and there was no convincing them otherwise. ‘Are you trying to get out of a kiss?’ Adam teased.
I didn’t respond. My desire for flirtation had evaporated at the mention of the university basements. But if Lucy didn’t balk at the idea of seeing a skeleton, surely I shouldn’t. I cleaned the cobwebs from their creaky bones every night. So what was holding me back?
Lucy leaned in and whispered in my ear. ‘Adam wants to impress you with how brave he is, you idiot. Swoon when you see the skeleton and fall into his arms. Men love that sort of thing.’
My stomach tightened. God, was this what normal girls did? Feign weakness? I could never imagine Mother, with all her strict morals, doing something so scandalous as slipping into forbidden hallways on a dare. But Father – he wouldn’t have hesitated. He would have been the one egging them on.
Dash it. I snatched the rum and poured the last few swallows down my throat. The boys cheered. I ignored the queasy feeling in my stomach – not from the rum, but from the thought of those dark hallways we were soon to enter.
TWO
We bundled into our coats and slipped into the cold night, crossing the Strand toward the university’s brick archway. This late only a few lanterns shone in the upper windows. The boys passed a bottle around with hushed laughter at being on school grounds after hours. I wrapped my arm around Lucy’s and tried to join the mirth, but the warmth didn’t spread below my smile. For the boys, this taste of mild scandal was titillating. They’d never known real scandal or how it could tear a person apart.
Adam led us to the side of the building, through a row of hedges to a small black door I’d used only once or twice. He unlocked it and held it open. Hesitation rooted my feet to the ground, but a gentle tug from Lucy led me inside. The door closed, plunging us into darkness broken only by the moonlight from one high window.
The hallway filled with the eerie silence of unused rooms. My hands itched for a rag and brush as a legitimate reason to be here. Coming on a lark to settle a silly wager, risking my job – it didn’t feel right.
Lucy squinted into the darkness, but I kept my eyes on the tile floor. I already knew what lay at the end of the hall.
‘Well?’ Adam asked. ‘Which way to the skeletons, Mademoiselle Guillotine?’
I started to head for the small door to the storage chambers, but a light at the opposite end of the corridor caught my eye. The operating theater. Odd; no one should have been there this late. Something about that light chilled my blood – it could only mean trouble.
‘We’re not alone,’ I said, nodding toward the door. The boys followed my gaze and grew quiet. Lucy slid off her glove and found my hand in the dark.
Adam started toward the operating theater, but I grabbed the fabric of his cuff to hold him back. The hallways were filled with the normal smells – chemicals and rotten things. Usually it didn’t bother me, but tonight it felt so overpower-ing that my head started to spin. A wave of weakness hit me and I grabbed his wrist harder.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
I waited a few seconds for the spell to pass. These spells were not uncommon, coming upon me suddenly, usually in the late evening, though I wasn’t about to explain their source to him. ‘The skeletons are the other way,’ I said.
‘Someone’s in the theater after hours. Whatever they’re doing, it has to be good. The skeletons can wait.’ His voice was charged. This was a game to them, I realized. If they got caught, the dean might give them a stern talking-to. I would lose my livelihood.
He cocked his head. ‘You aren’t scared, are you?’
I scowled and let go of his cuff. Of course I wasn’t scared. We made our way silently down the hall. As we approached the closed door, a sound began to gnaw at my ears. It took me back to my childhood, when I would hide outside the door to Father’s laboratory, listening, trying to imagine what was happening within before the servants chased me off.
The sound grew louder, a scrape-tap, scrape-tap. Unaccustomed to being in a laboratory, Lucy threw me a puzzled look. But I knew that sound. The scrape of scalpel on stone. A gesture surgeons made to clean the flesh from the blade between cuts.
Adam threw open the door. A half-dozen students huddled around a table in the center of the room, over which a single lamp formed an island of light. They looked up when we entered, and then after a few seconds their faces relaxed with recognition.
‘Adam, you cad, get in and close the door,’ said one of the students. He threw Lucy and me an annoyed look. ‘What are they doing here?’
‘They’ll be no trouble. Right, ladies?’ Adam raised his eyebrow, but I didn’t answer. A good part of me contemplated bolting out the door and leaving them to their sick lark. Yet I didn’t. As we drifted closer with hesitant steps, I could feel the stiffness in my bones easing, as though releasing some pent-up, slippery curiosity from between my joints.
Why were they in the operating theater after dark?
Adam peered over the surgeon’s shoulder. Their bodies blocked the table, but the metallic smell of fresh blood reached me, making my head spin. Lucy pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. Memories of my father flooded me. As a surgeon, blood had been his medium like ink to a writer. Our fortune had been built on blood, the acrid odor infused into the very bricks of our house, the clothes that we wore.
To me, blood smelled like home.
I shook away the feeling. Father left us, I reminded myself. Betrayed us. But I still couldn’t help missing him.
‘They shouldn’t be here,’ I murmured. ‘This building’s closed to students at night.’
But before Lucy could answer, the scrape of the scalpel sounded again, drawing my gaze irresistibly to the table. We stepped forward. The boys paid us little attention, except Adam, who moved aside to make room. My breath caught. On the table lay a dead rabbit, its fur white as snow and spotted with blood. Its belly had been sliced open, and several organs lay on the table. Lucy gasped and covered her eyes.
My eyes were wide. I felt vaguely sorry for the dead rabbit, but it was a far-off sort of thought, something Mother might have felt. I wasn’t naive. Dissection was a necessary part of science. It was how doctors were able to develop medicine and how surgeons saved lives. I’d only ever glimpsed dissections a handful of times – peeking through the keyhole of Father’s laboratory or cleaning up after medical students. After work, in my small room at the lodging house, I’d studied the diagrams in my father’s old copy of Longman’s Anatomical Reference, but black-and-white illustrations were a poor substitute for the real thing.
Now my eyes devoured the rabbit’s body, trying to match the fleshy bits of organ and bone to the ink diagrams I knew by heart. An urge raced through my veins to touch the striated muscle of the heart, feel the smooth length of intestine.
Lucy clutched her stomach, looking pale. I watched her curiously. I didn’t feel the need to turn away like normal ladies should. Mother had drilled into me the standards of proper young ladies, but my impulses didn’t always obey. So I had learned to hide them instead.
I looked back at the rabbit. Creeping vines of worry wound around my ankles and up my legs.
‘Something’s wrong.’
The student performing the surgery glanced up, irritated, before selecting another scalpel and returning to work.
‘Sh,’ Adam breathed in my ear. My chest tightened as my eyes darted over the rabbit. There. The rabbit’s rear foot jerked. And there. Its chest rose and fell in a quick breath. I clasped Lucy’s hand, feeling the blood rushing to the base of my skull.
My brain processed the movements disjointedly, with an odd feeling like I had seen all this before. I gasped. ‘It’s alive.’
The rabbit’s glassy eye blinked. My heart faltered. I turned to Adam, bewildered, and then back to the table, where the boys continued to operate. They ignored me, as they ignored the rabbit’s movements. Something white and hot filled my head and I gripped the edge of the table, jolting it. ‘It’s not dead!’
The surgeon turned to Adam in annoyance. ‘You’d better keep them quiet.’
‘It isn’t supposed to be alive,’ Lucy stammered, her face pale. The handkerchief slipped from her hand, falling to the floor slowly, dreamlike. ‘Why is it alive?’
‘Vivisection.’ The word came out of me like a vile thing trying to escape. ‘Dissection of living creatures.’ I took a step back, wanting nothing to do with it. Dissection was one thing. What they were doing on that table was only cruel.
‘It’s just a rabbit,’ Adam hissed. Lucy began to sway. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the operation. Had they even bothered to anesthetize it?
‘It’s against the law,’ I muttered. My pulse matched the thumps of the frightened rabbit’s still-beating heart. I looked at the placement of the organs on the table. At the equipment carefully laid out. It was all familiar to me.
Too familiar.
‘Vivisection is prohibited by the university,’ I said, louder.
‘So is having women in the operating theater,’ the surgeon said, meeting my eyes. ‘But you’re here, aren’t you?’
‘Bunch of Judys,’ a dark-haired boy said with a sneer. The others laughed, and he set down a curled paper covered with diagrams. I caught sight of the rough ink outline of a rabbit, splayed apart, incision cuts marked with dotted lines. This, too, was familiar. I snatched the paper. The boy protested but I turned my back on him. My ears roared with a warm crackling. The whole room suddenly felt distant, as though I was watching myself react. I knew this diagram. The tight handwriting. The black, dotted incision lines. From somewhere deep within, I recognized it.
Behind me, the surgeon remarked to another boy in a whisper, ‘Intestines of a flesh-toned color. Pulsing slightly, likely from an unfinished digestion. Yes – there, I see the contents moving.’
With shaking fingers I unfolded the paper’s dog-eared right corner. Initials were scrawled on the diagram: H.M. Blood rushed in my ears, drowning out the sound of the boys and the rabbit and the clicking electric light. H.M. – Henri Moreau.
My father.
Through his old diagram, these boys had resurrected my father’s ghost in the very theater where he used to teach. I was flooded with a shivering uneasiness. As a child I’d worshipped my father, and now I hated him for abandoning us. Mother had fervently denied the rumors were true, but I wondered if she just couldn’t bear to have married a monster.
Suddenly the rabbit jolted and let out a scream so unnatural that I instinctively made the sign of the cross.
‘Good lord,’ Adam said, watching with wide eyes. ‘Jones, you cad, it’s waking up!’
Jones rushed to the table, which was lined with steel blades and needles the length of my forearm. ‘I gave it the proper dose,’ he stuttered, searching through the glass vials.
The rabbit’s screams pierced my skull. I slammed my hands against the table, the paper falling to the side. ‘End this,’ I cried. ‘It’s in pain!’
Lucy sobbed. The surgeon didn’t move. Frustrated, I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Do something! Put it out of its misery.’
Still, none of the boys moved. As medical students, they should have been trained for any situation. But they were frozen. So I acted instead.
On the table beside me was the set of operating instruments. I wrapped my hand around the handle of the ax, normally used for separating the sternum of cadavers. I took a deep breath, focusing on the rabbit’s neck. In a movement I knew had to be fast and hard, I brought down the ax.
The rabbit’s screaming stopped.
The awful tension in my chest dripped out onto the wet floor. I stared at the ax, distantly, my brain not yet connecting it with the blood on my hands. The ax fell from my grasp, crashing to the floor. Everyone flinched.
Everyone but me.
Lucy grabbed my shoulder. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said, her voice strained. I swallowed. The diagram lay on the table, a cold reminder of my father’s hand in all this. I snatched it and whirled on the dark-haired boy.
‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded.
He only gaped.
I shook him, but the surgeon interrupted. ‘Billingsgate. The Blue Boar Inn.’ His eyes flashed to the ax on the floor. ‘There’s a doctor there.’
Lucy’s hand tightened in mine. I stared at the ax. Someone bent down to pick it up, hesitantly. Adam. Our eyes met and I saw his horror at what I’d done, and more – disgust. Lucy was wrong. He wouldn’t want to marry me. I was cold, strange, and monstrous to those boys, just like my father. No one could love a monster.
‘Come on.’ She tugged me through the hallways to the street outside. It was cold, but my numb skin barely felt it. A few people passed us, bundled up, too concerned about the weather to notice the blood on our clothes. Lucy leaned against a brick wall and pressed a hand over her chest. ‘My God, you cut its head off!’
Blood was on my hands, on the tattered lace of my sleeves, even dotting the diamond ring my mother had left me. I stared at the paper in my fist. The Blue Boar Inn. The Blue Boar Inn. I couldn’t let myself forget that name.
Lucy braced her hands on my shoulders, shaking me. ‘Juliet, say something!’
‘They shouldn’t have done that,’ I said, feeling feverish in the cold night air. The paper was damp from my sweating palms. ‘I had … I had to stop it.’
I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder tighter. ‘Of course you did. Our cook kills a brace of hares for dinner all the time. That’s all you did – killed a rabbit that was already going to die.’ But her voice was shaking. What I had done was unnatural, and we both knew it.
A cold breeze blew off the Thames, carrying the pungent smell of sweat and Lucy’s perfume. I drew a shallow breath. The rumors of so long ago crept through the streets, coming back to life. All I had were slips of memories of my father: the feel of his tweed jacket, the smell of tobacco in his hair when he kissed me good night. I couldn’t bring myself to believe my father was the madman they said he was. But I’d been so young when it happened, just ten years old. As I matured, more memories surfaced. Deeper ones, of a cold, sterile room and sounds in the night – recollections that never entirely disappeared, no matter how far I pushed them into the recesses of my mind.
I didn’t tell Lucy about the diagram with his initials in the corner. I didn’t tell her that he used to keep it neatly in a book in his laboratory, a place I glimpsed only when the servants were cleaning. I didn’t tell her that, after all these years trying to accept that he must be dead, a part of me suspected otherwise.
That maybe my father was alive.
THREE
London society was not kind to the daughter of a madman. To the orphan of a madman, even less. My father had been the most celebrated physiologist in England, a fact Mother was quick to mention to anyone who’d listen. My parents used to host elegant parties for his fellow professors. Long after bedtime I would creep downstairs in my nightdress and peek through the drawing room keyhole to take in the sound of their laughter and the smell of rich tobacco. How ironic that those same men were the first to brand him a monster.
After the scandal broke and Father disappeared, Mother and I were shunned by the company we once called friends. Even the church closed its doors to us. We were forced to sell our home and possessions to pay for his debts. We were left penniless for months, relying only on Mother’s prayers and a string of grumbling relatives’ sense of duty. I was young at the time, so I didn’t understand when suddenly we had an apartment again, a small but richly appointed second-story flat near Charing Cross. Mother would take me to piano lessons and have me fitted for gowns and buy herself expensive rouge and satin undergarments. An older gentleman came by, once a week like clockwork, and Mother would send me out for chocolate biscuits in the café downstairs. He wore strong cologne that masked a pungent, stale smell, but Mother never said anything about it. That’s how I knew he must be rich – no one ever says the rich stink.
When consumption took my mother, the old gentleman hardly wanted to keep the dead mistress’s bony daughter around. He paid for Mother’s funeral – though he didn’t attend – and let me stay in the apartment for a week. Then he sent over a brusque maid who boxed up and sold Mother’s things and handed me a banknote for their value. No doubt he considered himself generous. I was fourteen at the time, and totally on my own.
Fortunately, a former colleague of my father’s named Professor von Stein heard of Mother’s death and inquired at King’s College for suitable employment for a young woman of distinguished background. Once they found out who my father was, though, the best offer I got was to be a part of Mrs Bell’s cleaning crew. It paid just enough for a room at a lodging house with twenty other girls my age. Some were orphaned, some had come to the city to support younger brothers and sisters, some just showed up for a week and vanished. We came from different backgrounds. But all of us were alone.
I shared a room with Annie, a fifteen-year-old shopgirl from Dublin who had a habit of going through my belongings whether I was there or not. She once came across the embossed, locked wooden box I kept at the back of our closet shelf. I never told her what was inside, no matter how much she begged.
The night I killed the rabbit, I kept the blood-spattered diagram under my pillow. At work the next day I tucked it into my clothing, like a talisman. It infused my every waking thought with memories of my father. Every remembrance, every gesture, every kind word from him had been eclipsed by the terrible rumors I’d heard in the years since.
I slipped away from my mop to find Mrs Bell scrubbing towels in the laundry room. Her light eyes, narrowed as if she knew I was up to no good, found mine through the billows of steam.
I picked up a bar of soap and chipped at it with my fingernail. What did I expect to find at the inn, anyway? My father, raised from the dead, smoking a cigar in his tweed jacket and waiting to tell me a bedtime story?
‘Mrs Bell,’ I asked, setting down the mutilated bar of soap. ‘Do you know where the Blue Boar Inn is?’
I had to wait until Sunday after church before I could follow Mrs Bell’s directions south of Cable Street, avoiding the swill thrown out from lodging houses. As I paused at the corner to find the right street, I became aware of someone watching me. It was a girl around my age, though her face was caked with powder and rouge that made her look older. A striped satin dress limply hung on her thin frame. She stared at me with hollow eyes. I looked away sharply. If it hadn’t been for my employment at King’s College, that might have been me on the corner, waiting for my next gentleman. I leaned against a brick wall, queasy. Lucy had told me what happened at brothels. That had been my mother’s desperate solution, at the expense of the virtues she held so dear. I might not have as many virtues to lose, but I was determined that wouldn’t be my future.
The prostitute ambled down the street, coming toward me leisurely, and I hurried in the other direction, until I suddenly came upon a faded blue sign swinging above a thick door, painted with a tusked beast I assumed was once meant to be a boar.
The inn was a wooden three-story building, keeling slightly toward its neighbor. I tugged on the heavy iron latch and entered. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Little sunlight passed through windows coated with smoky residue. I found myself in a dining hall, among sullen patrons murmuring in low voices over their midday meal. The furniture was worn but made of heavy oak that had recently been polished. None of the patrons looked up except a thin man twice my age, face marred with pox scars, who stared at my Sunday dress and the Bible I clutched in my arms. It seemed the Blue Boar did not see many young ladies.
A portly woman came out from the kitchen and raised her eyebrows. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked me over: my face that hinted of aristocracy and clothes that spoke of poverty. ‘Come for a room?’
‘No … I haven’t,’ I stammered. ‘I’m looking for a man. A doctor.’ My heart pounded, warning me not to get my hopes up. ‘His name is Henri Moreau.’
She peered at me queerly. I must have been the color of ripe tomatoes. ‘We aren’t in the habit of giving out our patrons’ information. You understand.’ It was a command, not a question. Was he there, I wondered, in the same building, maybe right above our heads?
‘I mean no trouble. I only need to speak with him.’
Her face didn’t budge. ‘No one by that name here.’
The ground fell out from beneath me. She was mistaken. She had to be. Or else I’d been a fool, thinking some old paper meant my father was here, in London, the city from which he’d been banished.
The set of her mouth softened. She took my elbow and pulled me away from the diners to a staircase that led into the shadows of the upper floors. ‘We’ve no one by that precise name, but there is a doctor.’
My heart leapt. ‘Where is he? What does he look like?’
‘Calm down, now. You say you don’t want trouble, and nor do I.’ Her gaze slid to the dining hall, nervously. ‘But if it’s the doctor you’re after, you should know Dr James has been nothing but trouble since he arrived.’
Dr James. Not Dr Moreau. A pseudonym, perhaps? My mind was grasping, trying to form the parts of the equation into a reasonable solution, but there was only one logical conclusion: Dr James was someone else entirely, one of a hundred visiting doctors in London. And yet my curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied without proof.
‘I’m sorry to hear it. Perhaps if I may speak to him …’
‘Mind you, the young gentleman is gracious enough. It’s that companion of his. Makes the other guests nervous, you understand.’
‘Certainly.’ I nodded, breathless. No one would describe Father as young. So could the odd companion she spoke of be my father, then?
She turned her attention to my dress, narrowing her eyes, and spoke in a low voice. ‘I won’t question what a pretty young lady wants with that pair, but I doubt you’re a relation. This is a reputable establishment. I don’t want no trouble, you hear?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ A nervous bloom spread across my cheeks at the realization of what she was implying about a young woman alone with two strange men.
Her chin jerked toward the stairs. ‘Second floor. Room on the left.’
I dashed to the second-floor landing, gripping the railing to steady myself. To my left was only one door, tucked into an alcove. A tarnished mirror next to the door reflected my face, wide-eyed and flushed. I looked like a madwoman. I paused. What was I doing chasing a whim? I should have been with the other girls from the lodging house, gossiping about the handsomest boys in church this morning.
But here I was. I slid my Bible into my bag and knocked cautiously.
There was no answer. Should I wait? I rapped again, harder. Behind me, low voices and the sounds of clinking glasses floated up from the dining hall.
A wild idea struck me. I tried the knob – locked, of course. It wasn’t a sophisticated lock, though, so any skeleton key might do. I rifled through my bag for the key to my wooden box at the lodging house. At last I found the small bronze key and compared it to the door’s lock. Too small. I knelt, peering into the keyhole. Inside was a small room with an unmade bed and stacks of steamer trunks. I tried the key again, willing it to reach the tumbler, and I almost had it before it slipped out of my hands.
‘Blast,’ I muttered, bending to retrieve it. As I stood back up, I brushed the hair out of my eyes, the movement reflected in the mirror. I looked again at my face, studying the hollows under my cheekbones, the shadow around my eyes, wondering if Father would even recognize me now. Suddenly, a second face appeared behind my own – a dark face covered in a thick beard that obscured a man’s heavy features. His forehead slanted with an odd deformity, leading to a brow that thrust forward, hooding his eyes. I gasped and tried to turn, but his beastly hands dug into my shoulders. The key fell as he forced a cloth over my mouth. The last things I saw before passing out were his yellow-green eyes glowing in the mirror.
FOUR
I awoke, head throbbing, the taste of chloroform in my throat. I was on the same wooden-framed bed I’d seen through the keyhole. I bolted upright. Scanned the room for my attacker, for a weapon, for an explanation as to why I was there.
I remembered in flashes. The face in the mirror. The cloth against my mouth.
Drugged.
A rush of panic sent my vision blurring and my ears roaring as I ransacked my clothes, relieved to find no signs I’d been harmed. Regardless, I needed something to use as a weapon – a fire poker or a letter opener. But a wave of nausea knocked me back to the pillows. I squeezed my eyes shut until my foggy head began to clear.
I was alone at least. In someone’s room – the deformed man’s, most likely. From the angle of sunlight pouring into the room, I must have been out for hours. A sick taste rose in my throat as I recalled the feel of his hairy hand against my mouth. My breath came fast, faster, until I thought I might black out. I gritted my teeth, holding in the urge to scream. Panic would get me nowhere.
I opened my eyes, slowly. Testing the door wasn’t an option until my head cleared enough for me to stand. But the room was full of clues about my abductor. Crates and trunks were stacked by the door three deep, surrounded by packages wrapped in brown paper. He was traveling, then, and somewhere far away, judging by the cargo. A caged parrot on the dresser eyed me warily while picking at the bars with its beak. I stared at it.
My abductor traveled with a parrot?
A second door, which I assumed led to an adjoining room, was shut. Beside the bed was an open trunk, which I managed to lean toward without too much nausea. It contained rows of glass bottles, partially obscured by packing straw. I brushed the straw aside and took out a bottle: Elk Hill brandy. My father’s favorite.
Before I could piece together what it meant, the door to the adjoining room swung open, revealing the beastly face from the mirror.
‘You!’ I cried. I coiled my fist around the bottle neck, ready to swing. I tried to stand but my feet wouldn’t obey, and I grappled for the bedpost for support.
His was not the face of a monster, as I’d first imagined, but it was disfigured nonetheless. A wild black beard covered a protruding jaw below a snub nose and deep-set eyes. He moved with an odd lurch, as though he was unused to his own legs. Despite his disfigurement, he didn’t seem so threatening now, partly due to the tray of tea and biscuits he was holding.
Still, my body tensed. He stepped forward with a shuffle, just far enough to set the tray on the foot of the bed. He scurried back and twisted his mouth into what might have been a smile.
The strange act of kindness only made me more uneasy. ‘Get away!’ I cried. I hurled the bottle at him, but my vision was distorted from the drugs, and it fell uselessly past his shoulder into a crate of clothes. I climbed over the bed, stumbling with vertigo, grabbing at his wrinkled linen shirt and hammering him with my fists. ‘Someone, help!’
The man did not speak. He merely cringed and let me pummel him. But the side door jerked open again with a squeal of hinges and another man rushed in, a young man with shirt half-buttoned and suspenders at his sides. He threw his arms around mine to keep me from tearing the beastly man apart.
‘Let me go!’ I cried. But he was powerfully built, and it didn’t take him long to pin my wrists in the shackles of his hands.
‘Juliet! Stop this!’ he said.
I froze at the gruff sound of my name. The young man let me go and I whirled on him. His face was deeply tanned, odd during the London winter. Loose blond hair fell to his broad shoulders. My lungs seized up.
I knew him. I’d have known him anywhere, despite the years.
‘Montgomery,’ I gasped. But what was he doing here, with my abductor? I’d expected to find my father, if anyone at all. The last person I’d expected to find was my family’s former servant.
My knees buckled from shock, but he grabbed my elbows, holding me up. I had thought I was alone in the world. But here he was, the one person who knew me, the only one left who shared my dark secrets. Just seeing him started to untangle the swollen tightness in my chest.
I pulled away from him, not ready for the fragile, preserved knot of my heart to unravel so quickly.
‘It’s safe. You’re not in danger.’ He held out a hand as though he was calming a wild horse, his handsome features set with seriousness and concern. The recognition in that expression nearly unbalanced the cadence of my heart. He was two years older than me, the son of our scullery maid. After his mother died when he was very young, my parents kept him on to help with the horses and Father’s research. I’d had one of those hopeless crushes on him girls get before they even know what love is, but he had disappeared six years ago, the same time as my father. Wanting nothing more to do with our terrible family secrets, I’d assumed.
Now here he was, flesh and blood and blue eyes and a total mystery.
Montgomery glanced at the hairy-faced man, who shuffled nervously. ‘Leave us,’ he said, and the man obeyed. A part of me relaxed to see his deformed shape disappear into the other room. But then I realized I was alone with Montgomery, totally unprepared. My hand shot to my coiled braid, which had fallen loose and wild in the commotion. Blast. I must have looked like an idiot.
He finished buttoning his shirt and slid the suspenders over his shoulders, throwing me hesitant glances as he tied his blond hair back. He wasn’t a thin, silent boy any longer. In six years he’d become a well-built young man with shoulders like a Clydesdale and hands that could swallow my own. Montgomery and I used to spend so much time together as children, though he was a servant and I the master’s daughter. I’d never been at a loss for words with him.
Until now.
‘I am sorry about the chloroform,’ he said at last.
I swallowed. ‘Odd way of greeting an old friend, don’t you think?’
He paused while buttoning his cuffs. ‘You were trying to break into our room. Balthazar behaves irrationally sometimes. But he meant you no harm.’
I pulled the pins out of my hair and raked my fingers through it, hoping for some semblance of sanity. ‘Balthazar? That beast has a name?’
‘He’s my associate. Don’t let his appearance frighten you.’
The word associate made me hesitate. Montgomery wasn’t even twenty yet, barely old enough to be anyone’s associate himself.
He sat on a footstool and rested his elbows on his knees, peering at me with that same seriousness he’d had as a boy. It struck me, with a rush of blood to my cheeks, that he had become extremely handsome. I looked away quickly, before he could see my thoughts reflected in my face.
‘I didn’t expect to find you here,’ I said.
Something like a smile played on the corner of his mouth. ‘It’s a coincidence that you were breaking into my room?’
‘No.’ My face burned. Words weren’t coming out right. My mind still couldn’t comprehend that he was actually sitting here, an arm’s length away, grown into a handsome young man. I wondered how I looked to him, and if I was much changed from the sullen little girl he used to push around the courtyard in our wheelbarrow in an effort to make her smile.
My bag rested on the dresser next to the parrot’s cage. I loosened the string and took out the folded diagram from between the Bible’s pages. I handed it to him, but he gave it only a glance, as if he didn’t even need to look at it.
‘You’ve seen that before,’ I concluded.
‘Yes.’ His features grew serious again. ‘It belongs to me. At least, it did. I acquired it from an old colleague of your father’s, but it was stolen two weeks ago with other documents. So you see why Balthazar reacted as he did. He thought you were a thief.’ He unfolded the paper and raised an eyebrow. ‘The blood spatters are new.’
My face turned red. How could I explain what had happened? I still felt the weight of the ax in my hand, remembered the frightened look on the boys’ faces. Like them, Montgomery would think I’d gone mad. He sat here in his well-tailored clothes, a servant at his call, crates of expensive items around him. The scandal obviously hadn’t brought his life crashing down. He’d changed from a servant to a gentleman, and I’d done exactly the opposite. I must look terribly pathetic to him. And the small scrap of pride I had wouldn’t let Montgomery think me lacking.
I stood. ‘I should go. This was a mistake.’
‘Wait, Juliet.’ Montgomery held my arm. For a second, his eyes flashed over my dress, my face. He swallowed. ‘Miss Moreau, I should say. I haven’t seen you in six years, and now I find you breaking into my room.’ A muscle clenched in his jaw. ‘You owe me an explanation.’
He’d been our servant, I told myself. I didn’t owe him anything. But that was a lie. Montgomery and I were bound together by our past. This was the boy who had secretly taught me biology because my father wouldn’t. Who’d told me fairy tales late at night to distract me from the screams coming from the laboratory.
I sank back down, not sure how to act around him. His blue eyes glowed in the hazy light from the window. He moved the tea tray to a side table and poured me a cup, adding two lumps of sugar, then breaking a third in half with a spoon, crushing it, and stirring it in slowly – the peculiar way I used to prepare my tea when I was a little girl. I was so oddly touched that he remembered that I didn’t tell him I’d given up sugar in my tea long ago. As I took the cup, his rough fingers grazed mine and I bit my lip. Just the brief touch sent the muscle of my heart clenching with a longing to feel that bond with him again.
My throat felt tight, but I forced out words. ‘I found the diagram and recognized it. I thought, maybe, it meant Father was here. Alive.’ Spoken, it sounded even more foolish. I braced myself for his laughter.
But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even flinch. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ he said softly. ‘It’s only Balthazar and myself.’
I took a sip of the tea, which had grown cold, but its sweetness replaced the chloroform’s lingering tang. I wondered what Montgomery thought of me, showing up here, looking for a dead man. Father’s death had never been confirmed – just assumed. I think the world wanted him dead, or simply forgotten.
But a girl couldn’t just forget her father.
‘Do you know what happened to him?’ I asked. I wanted to ask if Montgomery believed the rumors, but the words wouldn’t come. I was frightened of what his answer might be.
He looked toward the window, foot tapping a little too fast against the table leg. He shifted in his stiff clothes, as though his body wasn’t used to them. It struck me that a wealthy medical student wouldn’t pick so uncomfortably at his starched cuffs as Montgomery was doing. I wondered how recently he had acquired his fortune.
As if sensing my thoughts, he loosened his shirt’s collar. ‘The day he disappeared, I ran away too. I was afraid I might be accused as well, because I sometimes helped him in the laboratory. I’ve heard speculation … that he died.’
The teacup shook in my hand. I felt at the point of shattering with warring emotions. I wondered if that was what Father had felt like before he went mad – shattered. The teacup rattled more, and I set it next to the blood-spattered paper. ‘What do you even want with this?’ I nudged the dotted lines that formed a split-open rabbit. I knew it was abhorrent, but my gaze kept creeping back to the black lines, obsessively tracing the graceful arcs of the body.
‘I study medicine. I’m not a servant anymore.’ His words were pointed.
‘But this? Vivisection?’ It was hard to talk about these things with him. The corset I had worn under my Sunday dress suddenly felt too tight. I pressed my hands against my sides. I thought of that rabbit, its twitching paws, its screams. Not even science could justify what those boys had done. And I knew Montgomery, deep in my marrow. He wasn’t like them. He had a strong heart. He’d never do something he knew wasn’t right.
His foot tapped faster and his gaze drifted around the room until it settled on the parrot. His throat tightened. ‘It was among a collection of documents, that’s all.’
He’d always been a terrible liar. I studied him from the corner of my eye, wondering. His gaze darted again to the parrot on the dresser, and I stood up and started toward the cage, just wanting to look closer at its iridescent feathers as some sort of distraction from everything that was happening. Montgomery’s eyes were too real, too evocative, too familiar. I didn’t know what to do with myself around him.
But as soon as I reached for the cage, Montgomery shot up, knocking over the footstool, and beat me to the dresser. His hand closed over a small silver object next to the parrot’s cage. I blinked, uncertain, surprised by his actions.
‘What is that?’ I said quietly.
His fist clamped the object like a vise. His chest and arms were tensed. He’d always been strong. Now he was powerful.
Curiosity made me bolder. My fingers drifted away from the parrot’s cage and rested a breath above Montgomery’s closed fist. I wanted to touch his hand, feel the brush of his skin against mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
‘Montgomery, what is that in your hand?’
His face was broken with things unsaid. ‘Miss Moreau …’ The title sounded too formal on his lips. Juliet, I wanted him to call me.
My fingers trembled slightly. ‘Please. Tell me.’
Something changed in his face then. He seemed so grown up, but it was all an act. I knew because I’d played the same role for years. But being with him tore down that facade and left me stripped, vulnerable, just like the look on his face now.
‘Don’t be angry, Miss Moreau.’ His voice was little more than a whisper. He looked away, softly, and opened his fist. The object dropped into my palm.
A pocket watch. I turned it over in my hand. Silver, with a gouge in the glass face and an inscription on the back that had all but worn away. It didn’t matter. I knew the words by heart. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. Unlike my mother, who’d maintained her devoutness even after becoming a mistress, Father had a scientist’s skeptical fascination with religion. The watch had been a gift to him from his father, a bishop of the Anglican Church. Father had little use for the Ten Commandments, but the inscription was one rule he believed in and expected me to uphold.
Father had carried this watch every single day. He’d never have left it behind. Which meant either Montgomery had stolen it, or …
Montgomery folded my hands over the watch, and his hands over mine.
‘I’m sorry. He made me swear never to tell you he was alive.’
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