Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  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 abse
ntly 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 hand 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.”

  ELEVEN

  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 nota
tions 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.”