The Winter Garden

by Kara Jorgensen

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”

  “Until recently,” his voice never rose above a whisper, “I thought you knew but were ignoring me.”

  “I had no idea. You do not look the same as you did then.” She swallowed hard. “Immanuel, if I was dead, how did I… come back?”

  “When I came to England, my mother sent me with a family heirloom, a pendent that had been in our family since the Dark Ages. She told me to use it if I was ever in danger, but after I realized you were dead, I knew you needed it more than I did. To make the solution work, I had to add blood, and I used my own. That is what tied us together.” A weak, bitter smile crossed his colorless lips. “You were right, we are bound by blood.”

  Immanuel and Emmeline paused as the boards of the stairs a floor below creaked under Eliza Hawthorne’s light tread. For an instant their gazes met, and the young woman jumped to her feet and pulled the dish from his hand. As she reached the doorway, she turned. How could she have been so cruel to him? She had dragged him through snow, cursing him the entire way, when he had sacrificed so much to save her.

  “Thank you for saving me.” I didn’t deserve it. “I am sorry for how I have treated you.”

  Before he could respond, the young woman slipped out in the hall and dashed down the stairs with the dull clap of her slippers echoing in the still house. Had he done the right thing by telling her? Now that Emmeline knew their connection, they were in more danger than ever before. She still had no idea who kidnapped them or that she saw him each week at the Spiritualist society.

  A heron-grey steamer chugged down Wimpole Street, illuminating the icy pavement. He sighed. There was only one person who could know what Lord Rose was after, and he had just arrived home.

  Chapter Twenty-Four:

  His Father’s Burden

  With a tired sigh, James Hawthorne stepped over the shards of glass scattered in front of his porch and across the steps. He glanced over his shoulder as two bobbies conversed on the other side of the street while nodding toward number thirty-six. Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, he looked back at the glass, but with fatigue weighing heavily on his mind, he shrugged off the odd behavior of the policemen and stepped inside.

  “Thank goodness you are home!” Eliza called as she darted out of the parlor and came toward him. She drew near as if to embrace him but let her arms drop before they could touch.

  When she met his gaze, her usually steady eyes glinted with fear. “What is the matter?”

  “Spring-heeled Jack attacked again.”

  “Where? Is Emmeline all right?”

  “She is fine.” She dropped her voice as her husband hung up his coat and pulled off his hat and gloves, but it cracked against her will. “He attacked Immanuel.”

  “Immanuel?” James’s eyes widened as he remembered Katherine Waters’ lifeless form strewn across her coverlet. “Is he—”

  “He is upstairs, weak but very much alive.”

  The doctor stroked his jaw before taking his glasses off to clean them with his handkerchief. His theory was gone. He had imagined Miss Waters was murdered by someone she knew and the Spring-heeled Jack sighting was simply hysteria, but Eliza Hawthorne was not some overwrought lady’s maid. If she saw Jack, then he existed. Swallowing hard, James strained to find some tie between the noblewoman and his father-in-law’s protégé, but neither seemed to have enemies. The young man had only been in London a few months, most of which were spent in torture, and his only contacts were their family members. James grimaced at the prospect of a less discerning Ripper.

  “Was the attack the same as with Miss Waters?” he asked as they mounted the stairs.

  “Exactly the same. A three-pronged wound on the left side of the neck accompanied by burns. He was electrocuted like she was, but he lost a significant amount of blood during the scuffle.” Eliza sighed as they passed the study and stood only a few feet from their bedroom door. “You can speak to him in the morning. I sent him to bed after suturing the wound and giving him a plate of food to hopefully counteract the anemia.”

  “Good.”

  Dr. Hawthorne was about to follow his wife to bed when his eyes fell on the gap between the molding and the door of the study. Something shifted in the darkness, and as it turned, a blue eye locked onto him.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Yes, I just need to check something.”

  With a huff, Eliza closed their bedroom door, and he slipped into his office. Normally, he would have been weary of someone lurking in his study under the cover of night, but when he flipped on the lamps, he found an ashen Immanuel Winter sitting before him.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in bed, Mr. Winter?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be with Lord Rose and the queen?” Immanuel blurted but stifled his anger until it dissipated down his arms and out his fingertips. “You are home early. Am I to assume Lord Rose never showed?”

  He shook his head as he settled behind his desk and let his eyes fall on the lump of gauze on the young man’s neck. “Eliza told me what happened. Are you all right?”

  “No, I was stabbed and electrocuted by a madman.”

  Raising his eyes, James met Immanuel’s hardened gaze and shaking form as he struggled to stay composed. For a moment, he thought he might cry, but instead he knit his brows and stared the doctor down with an intensity he had never witnessed in him before.

  “Mr. Winter, what is the matter? I have never seen you in such a state.”

  “What sort of project are you and Lord Rose working on?”

  James leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I am not at liberty to discuss it. It does not involve you anyway.”

  “It does when your partner tries to murder me.” Immanuel’s jaw clenched as a lingering bolt coursed from his neck to his toes. “That is why he was not at your meeting. He left the party to come after me.”

  Staring at the other man, the doctor tried to speak but the words escaped him. “Why? You have nothing to do with the project.”

  “I called his bluff. In front of you and Mrs. Hawthorne, I said I knew him, and that was enough. I want to know why you are associated with the man who— who,” his voice broke as tears rose to his lids, “tortured me!”

  The doctor’s chest tightened at the image of his helper covered in sore-laden offal and blindfolded with the filthy cloth cutting into his swollen orbit. How could this be? Lord Rose was a notoriously volatile man whom he never trusted, but would he go so far as to starve, burn, and beat a young man to get what he wanted?

  “Is this some sick game to get me to divulge what I know? He tries to kill me and you nurse me back to health, so he can do it again. I still don’t know what was in it, and no amount of torture will get you the answer!”

  As strong as he wanted to be, his façade faltered. Too many emotions were surging through him, and in his fragile state, he couldn’t fight the tugging at his ribs or the wetness in his blotted eye. Dr. Hawthorne paled, but his eyes were soft with compassion and confusion rather than steeled with anger. A quavering sob broke from Immanuel’s lips as he covered his mouth just in time to stifle it. It was too much. If the doctor was in on it, then he was finished. Why couldn’t he have asked Adam to stay? He would have told him everything would be all right, and he would have believed him.

  “My boy, I most certainly was not involved in your abduction. This is all a horrible coincidence.” James watched as the German turned away to pull himself together but revealed the sticky, bloodied wad affixed to his neck. When he quieted and grew still with his eyes cast to the rug, the doctor softly prodded, “Immanuel, why did Lord Rose hurt you? What did he hope to gain?”

  “You will not believe me,” he croaked. “You are a man of science, and this cannot be explained by anything I know.”

  He leaned across the desk until Immanuel’s eyes drifted back to his face. “You would be surprised as to what I have seen. Magic and superstition are only natural laws we cannot yet explain. Please,
tell me, Immanuel, so I can get to the bottom of this.”

  Immanuel studied the doctor’s face, but James’s eyes never wavered or hardened with suspicion. The only reason he snuck into the study was to confront him, but now he was the one confessing. Maybe— maybe one divulgence would lead him to their greater tie. There was no way it could all be a coincidence. His potion and the doctor’s project had to be connected if Lord Rose wanted both so adamantly. Could the elixir have gotten the nobleman what he wanted without needing the doctor anymore?

  The tale of what happened that August day and September night poured out, irrevocably linking Immanuel Winter and Emmeline Jardine. With a silent sigh, his body sagged into the wooden chair. He had finally purged the poison Alastair Rose had infected him with, and the doctor had not once interrupted or scoffed at his claims. James Hawthorne stroked his jaw as he scowled in contemplation, letting his eyes fall upon the innocent victim of his father and Lord Rose’s ambition.

  “I was foolish to think I could stall and have a man like Lord Rose give up his pursuit of fortune,” Dr. Hawthorne uttered as the house groaned against the winter wind whipping just beyond the panes and bricks. “I owe you an apology, Mr. Winter. This is all my fault.”

  “Sir, you could not have anticipated—”

  “No, I should have foreseen that Lord Rose would try to find another venue through which he could complete our commission from the queen. You and your family’s heirloom were exactly the sort of thing he was looking for.”

  “Dr. Hawthorne, I have told you everything about what happened to me and your niece, but you still have not told me what this commission is. What could Lord Rose want with a potion that could save a life? He does not seem like a man who would save anyone but himself.”

  The doctor sighed. The boy had the right to know. “Alastair wants to use the elixir to bring Prince Albert back from the dead.”

  “Back from the dead?” Immanuel opened his mouth to speak but closed it as his mind combed through what he knew of British history. “But he died decades ago. You would have been a child at the time, and Prince Albert would be nothing more than bones now.”

  “My father took care of that. Let me start from the beginning.” Taking a key from his pocket, the doctor unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and withdrew a folio of papers tanned with age and crinkled where they jutted from the edge of the leather case. He flipped through the pages until he found a long sheet written in clear, uniform script and signed at the bottom by the queen. “A year before his death, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria sensed he was taking a turn for the worse. For years he had suffered from a debilitating affliction of the stomach and bowels, but in 1860, he grew weak and was in severe pain. My father was a prominent Harley Street physician, who had treated several members of the royal family before, but what lured the queen to him was his work with the Spiritualists. With the help of a medium named Charles Leopold, he studied death and conducted experiments to find a quantifiable soul. The queen came to them when no other doctor was able to help her husband. He was too weak to undergo exploratory procedures, but my father and Leopold concluded the only way to stave off death would be to sever his soul from his body, treat his condition, and put his soul back in.

  “It sounded simple enough, but my father realized through his experiments that if the body began to decay after death, there was no way to reestablish a connection with the soul. You may not know this, but the soul is at least partly electrical and attaches to the body through reciprocal charges binding them together. For a year, I barely saw my father as he worked tirelessly with Leopold to create the perfect formula that would not only preserve the prince consort but could be reversed to allow him to be reanimated. Traditional methods like formaldehyde permanently altered the tissue, but by the time the queen called them to a meeting at the palace, he had figured out a preservative that could be reversed even if he wasn’t yet sure how to do so completely. By the winter of 1861, Queen Victoria was despondent over his failing condition. She had lost her mother earlier that year, and Albert’s impending death was more than she could handle. If they were to save him, it would have to be soon.

  “All of their equipment was moved from London to Windsor Castle where Albert had been staying. He was rapidly deteriorating, but my father believed his death was not a certainty. If it had happened a few decades later, he probably could have recuperated, but at the time, he was wasting away. My father always told me that if Prince Albert had died, the queen and the country would have crumbled, but to know that he would be revived in the future, gave her enough hope to go on. On December fourteenth, Prince Albert spent time with each of his children and his wife before he was submerged in a cistern of chemicals and his soul was extracted from his body and deposited in a jar for safekeeping. From that point on, she dressed like a widow and would do so until he returned.”

  Immanuel’s heart skipped out of rhythm as he saw Lord Rose in his devil’s mask drawing out the jar from his metal ribs, studying the translucent, glittering shadow captured inside it. For thirty years, Prince Albert had been trapped in a manmade purgatory. The pain that coursed through his body when the device sucked out his soul hurt more than anything he had ever felt. What was the difference between being tortured in a dungeon and being confined to a glass cage?

  “And what did the prince think of what was to be done to him?” he asked, steadying his voice with a hard swallow.

  “I do not know. My father never discussed that. I would assume he went along with it to appease his wife and in hopes he would be cured.”

  “How did you and Lord Rose get involved?”

  “A few years after Prince Albert was put in Limbo, my father figured out how to reverse the chemicals and bring his body out of its suspended state, but he had a change of heart. He realized the ramifications of such a discovery and feared it could be used to create eternal life. If every monarch used the technology he and Leopold created, regimes would never change, monarchies would transform into dictatorships, and progress would cease. The moral ramifications were too much for him, so he decided to pretend he had never found the answer. Unfortunately, his contract with the queen stipulated he could not work on anything that did not pertain to reviving Prince Albert. Because he was no longer allowed to practice medicine, he was given the position of Coroner to the Queen, which gave him access to all the corpses he could need and kept him under the crown’s watch. My father did not anticipate that the queen would outlive him, and as per the contract, I inherited my father’s burden five years ago.”

  “So Lord Rose is related to Charles Leopold?”

  The doctor shook his head. “No, and I have no idea how Alastair Rose became involved with the Spiritualist society since he is not a medium. Leopold never had a son. I did not know Alastair was his heir until after he died. With Charles Leopold’s blessing, he rose to head of the London branch without question.”

  Alastair Rose had to have something to gain from all of this. He wouldn’t have bloodied his hands for glory. “How does Lord Rose profit from reviving him?”

  “The contract states that upon the successful completion of the project, we will be granted baronies, land, and a small fortune. You can see why Lord Rose would like to finish before the queen dies.” James pulled off his glasses and laid them on his desk before running his hands over his face. In the flickering glow of the gas lamps, the creases around his eyes and the grey at his temples were unmistakable. “Her Majesty’s project has torn apart my life and strained my marriage. I want nothing to do with this, yet my wife wants me to complete it just so we can have some semblance of a normal life. She does not care that if this technology is used by others, I will go down in history as a monster, but now, she will finally get her way.” He sighed. “Tomorrow, I will send word that I am ready to conduct the reanimation after Christmas.”

  “Dr. Hawthorne, you do not have to do this.”

  “With only your word that Lord Rose is Spring-heeled Jack and your tormenter, n
o court will convict him, and I have nothing to tie him to Katherine Waters if he really is Jack and not a copycat. It is the only way he will leave you and Emmeline alone, and hopefully, he will quit the Spiritualist society once he has an estate. I do not want my niece around him, but if we tell her to stay away from him, she will only want to be with him more.”

  Two clocks chimed downstairs, beckoning the early hours of a new day. “You should go to bed, Mr. Winter. There is no sense in staying up when there is nothing more to be done tonight.”

  How could he be expected to simply go to bed after learning all of this? To protect them, the doctor would have to go against his own morals and what he and his father had resisted for thirty years. Immanuel’s heart sunk. All of this, all of these lives in ruin, had been caused by the selfish desire to thwart nature. He reached the door but lingered as his hand trembled against the doorjamb. There was one thing he had to know.

  “Dr. Hawthorne, what— what did the machine that removed the soul look like?”

  “I never saw it myself, but my father said it was big enough to take up an entire wall with all the turbines and mechanisms needed to generate enough electricity.”

  “Ah. Good night, sir,” he whispered as he slipped out and down the hall.

  Chapter Twenty-Five:

  Hope for Happiness

  Sallow rain battered the window of Adam’s study, congealing and sliding down to the sill where it crystallized like peridot. He stared at the pane with the pen poised above his ledger, slowly dripping ink from the nib. Finish the books, and you can leave. Finish and you can leave, he repeated to himself, but as Adam stared at the jumble of numbers, he could not bring himself to add them up even if it would free him from the self-imposed confines of his house. At the crack of dawn, he had wanted to set out for Wimpole Street to check on Immanuel, but Hadley had suggested he allow the poor man the chance to sleep in and have some breakfast before he entertained a visitor. His sister was right, and to occupy his mind before he left, he decided to balance the books for her toy company. Closing the ledger, Adam sighed. He couldn’t do this right now. How could he think about profits and losses without knowing what state his friend was in? His friend. The world would call them friends, yet behind closed doors and in their minds, they were so much more. Somehow the right word didn’t exist for what they were.