Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  “Don’t say that,” I whispered.

  His flickering eyes found mine. “You know it’s the only possible end for me. I was never meant to exist.”

  “But you do exist, Edward. We’ll find the missing ingredient, and we’ll get rid of the Beast.” I realized how desperate my voice sounded. Desperate for him, or desperate for me, now that I had someone in my life who shared my secrets?

  “Juliet… ,” he muttered, and brushed the back of his hand against my cheek.

  Warmth bloomed where he touched me. For an instant I leaned into it, as starved for human contact as he was, and wicked temptations whispered in my head before I could twist away in shock at my own response. I was lonely, that was all, especially for someone I could talk to freely.

  He killed Alice, I reminded myself, thinking of my father’s sweet young maid. He could kill you, if you get too close.

  “How did you survive the fire?” I asked, as though we could pretend that touch had never happened.

  “The Beast is strong. He heals fast. I came to and was able to crawl out before the barn collapsed, and then I salvaged what I could from the house. The letters, for one.”

  “I want to see these letters.”

  He nodded. “I’ll go back to the brothel and collect them. I must return anyway for the chains I use to bind myself and some changes of clothes.”

  I chewed on a fingernail, pacing. “I want to help you, Edward, truly, but not if…” I swallowed, thinking of those drained bodies. “Not if you keep killing people.”

  “I’ll fetch the chains in the morning. He’s weaker early in the day. If he has the choice, he prefers to emerge at nighttime.”

  “And tonight? Can you promise me no one else will die tonight?”

  A flash of Annie Benton’s face, Sir Danvers Carew, the red-haired thief girl.

  Edward went to my worktable and searched through the vials, coming back with a heavy dose of sedative. “Give me this, then,” he said.

  “That much could kill you.”

  “You underestimate how strong I’ve gotten. It’s only for one night. Tomorrow I’ll have the chains.” He held it out to me, and I took it hesitantly. I’d gotten it from a veterinarian who had told me it was used to sedate animals for transportation. If it would stop a lion, it would stop Edward.

  “Give me your arm,” I said. “You’ll fall asleep in ten minutes, twenty at most.” He held it out to me and I inserted the needle into a vein, telling myself there was no choice, that I was doing this so we wouldn’t wake up to any more bloody headlines in the newspaper. I rolled his sleeve back down gently. “One more thing. Promise me you won’t see Lucy again. You’re putting her in danger by being around her.”

  He nodded a little hesitantly. “I’ll send her a note.”

  I felt the weight of the unfinished conversation and finally asked the question that kept circling in my thoughts.

  “What happened to Montgomery?”

  There was the pain again, sharp and quick, in my side, as though when Montgomery had shoved the dinghy away with his boot, he’d kicked my heart instead. I recapped the syringe, biting the inside of my cheek.

  Edward didn’t respond right away, and my mind filled with answers he wasn’t saying. Perhaps he’d killed Montgomery, or one of the beast-men had. Or Montgomery was still there, on the island, content never to see me again.

  “He’s alive,” Edward said at last, but I could tell he was holding something back. “He hunted me for weeks on the island. I left him notes, trying to get him to give me a chance to explain… . I thought maybe he could help me find a cure. But he was only interested in hunting me down, and I knew sooner or later he’d have his chance, and he wouldn’t win. The Beast is too strong. So I left, to come here and find a cure before my other half killed him.”

  I toyed with one of the silver forks in the pile of stolen silverware, watching the glints from the lantern. He stepped closer, dropping his voice. “Forget him, Juliet. He abandoned you. He was keeping secrets from you.”

  I glanced up from the fork. “Secrets?”

  “That he was helping your father, that he’d made some of the creatures himself, and worst of all…” He stopped and looked away.

  “What secret?” I asked. When he didn’t answer, I let the fork clatter to the floor and grabbed his suit lapel a little roughly. “What other secret was Montgomery keeping from me, Edward?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You loved him, and he left you. I’d never do that to you. I’d sooner cut off my own hand than do anything to cause you pain.” My fingers were still coiled in the stiff fabric of his lapel, and he whispered, “If you’d only give me a chance…”

  But I stepped back toward the cabinet, away from his promises and his offers. My breath was coming fast. The world was an upside-down place when Montgomery James was keeping secrets from me and Edward Prince telling me the truth.

  But Edward was right—Montgomery had lied to me. He had left me.

  I grabbed my coat before he could say another word, and said, “The professor will have half the city out looking for me. It’s so late… I must get back. I’ll leave Sharkey here with you; the drugs will put you to sleep in a few minutes, so lock the door behind me. If you aren’t too groggy tomorrow, go through Father’s journal—maybe you can make sense of it. I’ll come back tomorrow night with fresh supplies.” I squeezed the doorknob, afraid to let go. Terrified to leave him, terrified that I still might read of fresh murders tomorrow in the newspaper. Sedatives might not be enough. Chains might not be enough. I had seen what the Beast could do. I’d have to make something even stronger to contain him until we could find the cure.

  As I slid into my coat, my eyes darted around the room. Edward, so handsome as he checked his pocket watch, stood amid the twisted rosebushes, with Sharkey curled on the woodstove’s hearth and a warm fire churning away through the old iron door. Almost a sweet scene, if it hadn’t been so terrible. I threw on my coat and shut the door, heart pounding.

  I leaned my head back against the worn wood of the stairwell, eyes closed, uncertain if I was making the biggest mistake of my life by helping a murderer, or if I had found the one person in the world who understood me.

  TWELVE

  WHEN I’D LEFT THE house that morning, the professor had been so distracted by Isambard Lessing’s visit that he hadn’t asked when I’d be home. By now he must be worried sick, and I imagined every light in the house would be blazing, a search party gathered on the front steps.

  But as I approached the brownstone on Dumbarton Street, not a single light shone in the windows. The professor’s routine was predictable to a fault; brandy after dinner and a book until nine, then at the chime of the cuckoo clock, he retired to his bedroom on the third floor. But even as a man of habit, would he have dismissed Mary for the day and gone to bed without me home? Could he have been so distracted over his argument with Isambard Lessing that he’d forgotten to look into my room?

  My mind turned back to that historian, and with a sharp stab I remembered that the professor had introduced Lessing as a King’s Man. Could the professor have never left the King’s Club at all? Could Edward have possibly been right, that my own guardian was the secret colleague?

  Fears stirring, I slunk past the iron gate and tiptoed through the snow to climb the garden trellis. When I reached my bedroom window, shivering in the cold, I discovered that the window wouldn’t budge. I shoved my weight against it, but it held fast. I squinted through the glass. The padlock had been substituted with a fresh one.

  Blast. This didn’t bode well.

  I climbed back down and jumped into the garden, hesitant to knock on the door and wake the professor if it could at all be avoided. Fortunately, as I skirted the house, I found that Mary had left the kitchen window open a crack, and I silently thanked her forgetfulness. I gracelessly hoisted myself onto the window ledge and slid my stiff fingers into the crack, opening it as silently as I could.

  The kitchen was dark, the
icebox and basin nothing more than hulking shadows. I eased my head and shoulders in, kicking my feet to try to slide in further.

  I had almost made it when two hands grabbed me under the arms and hauled me roughly the rest of the way.

  I would have screamed if I’d found a voice. As it was, I fought and clawed, but the figure dropped me unceremoniously on the kitchen floor, where my knees banged on the hard stones and made stars flash in my eyes as I winced in pain. I reached for my knife, but my coat and skirts tangled around me as my hair spilled loose. I was able to push my hair back just in time to see a dark figure moving toward the kitchen table and striking a match.

  The match flared to life, showing the face of a woman. My hand paused above my boot, more in surprise than anything. A stranger, I thought at first, but no, that wasn’t right—I recognized something in her long, loose blond hair, the fine set of her features only starting to show the first signs of wrinkles around her deep-set eyes, her Germanic ancestry evident in her face, just like the professor’s, her uncle.

  “Elizabeth,” I said in a stunned whisper.

  She lit the hurricane lantern calmly, as though it didn’t trouble her in the least that I was collapsed in a bruised pile on the kitchen floor. She took a seat at the table and motioned to the opposite seat.

  “Miss Moreau, a surprise to be meeting again like this. Though I imagine you won’t mind if I call you Juliet, seeing as formality flew out the window when you crawled through it.”

  I scrambled into the seat, rubbing my elbow where I’d banged it. Ten years had passed since I’d last seen her, and yet little wear showed on her features. Her hair was just as beautiful as ever as it tumbled to her waist in soft waves that glowed in the lantern light. She was still dressed despite the late hour, in a pale red dress that was quite simple, though even a rag would look elegant on her. She gave me a smile that was slightly off balance, the only quirk in an otherwise perfectly proportioned face, and it looked so much like the professor’s that I started.

  “When did you arrive?” I stuttered.

  “Shortly before lunch. The professor had fallen asleep in the library, and asked me to check on you in your bedroom and say hello. Imagine my surprise when I found the room empty and the window lock broken.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” I swallowed thickly. “And about sneaking back in through the kitchen window. I didn’t want to worry the professor.”

  “Nor did I, which is why I told him you weren’t feeling well and were not to be disturbed for the remainder of the day.”

  “He doesn’t know that I wasn’t here?” I said, feeling a coil of hope.

  “I kept your secret,” she said, flashing those shrewd blue eyes at me. “For the time being, at least.”

  “Don’t tell him, please. I was only—”

  She held her hand up, silencing me. “Whatever you’re going to tell me won’t be the truth, but we’re all entitled to our secrets. I remember what it meant to be a young woman in a city like this. In a life like this, where everyone is watching your every move. The professor told me you were clever, and that broken lock on your bedroom window seemed to support that theory, so I left the kitchen window cracked after he went to bed and hoped you would have the good sense to climb in through it. It’s what I would have done.” She leaned forward. “You’d be wise to never sneak out of this house again, or else you had better get far craftier at it, because if I catch you another time I won’t hold my tongue again.”

  I nodded, unable to look her in the eye. I’d disappointed the professor’s niece before I had barely met her. She stood and crossed to the still-open window, which let in slips of cold air that left me shivering, and slid it closed. When she took her seat at the table again, the sternness had eased from her face, and a deep concern knotted her brow in its place.

  This is how a mother might look, I thought, and the idea filled me with a sense of loss and longing.

  “Now that we’ve gotten that behind us, you aren’t in trouble, are you?” Her eyes had a way of reaching somewhere deep inside me, beyond my past and my indiscretions and focusing instead only on my well-being. Such care from a stranger made my chest tight with an emotion I didn’t know how to process.

  I shook my head quickly. “No trouble. It was only a silly lark, sneaking out to see a friend.”

  She raised an eyebrow, uncertain whether to believe me, but then jerked her chin toward the top of the stairs, dismissing me. I gathered my skirt and hurried up, still shaken, and closed myself in my room.

  I didn’t know what I had been expecting from Elizabeth’s arrival. Perhaps just one more person to lie to. I certainly hadn’t expected a woman who thought like I thought, who anticipated my every move.

  Who would lie for me.

  THE NEXT DAY LUCY and I had an appointment at Weston’s Dressmakers to be fitted for gowns for the masquerade ball. Elizabeth insisted that Ellis, the driver, take me in the carriage and wait outside the store, because of all the Wolf of Whitechapel panic in the city. As the carriage rolled down the Strand, I heard the call of at least a dozen newspaper boys yelling out headlines, all of them about the Wolf. I pushed back the curtain and watched the swarms around the boys, everyone hungry for news of the city’s latest mass murderer. Signs had been pasted on the sides of buildings and alleyways with his nickname in thick red ink. I even saw two men and a portly older woman wearing metal breastplates not unlike Inspector Newcastle’s, as though the murderer might leap out onto the busiest street in London in pure daylight and try to rip their hearts out right there. I let the curtain fall back, disgusted. This city hungered for violence nearly as much as the Beast did.

  As I climbed out of the carriage, the sound of tense words caught my ear. A few paces from the dress shop doorway, Lucy and Inspector Newcastle stood arguing while his police carriage waited in the street with the door still open. My stomach tightened in fear, but I took a deep breath and tried to remember that he wouldn’t arrest me. In fact, having a police officer close to Lucy while Edward was in the city might be the most fortunate thing that had happened to me in a while. As I approached them, I caught the tail end of the inspector’s words.

  “I’m only saying that your father knows best. No one’s heard of this man’s family. How can you be certain he isn’t trying to take advantage of your father’s money?”

  “Of course no one knows him; he’s from Finland!”

  “Darling, Henry Jakyll is a complete stranger. You might think yourself infatuated with him, but your father has barely even met him, and—”

  “Is Father the one who wants to keep me from Henry? Or is it you?”

  As I approached, Inspector Newcastle caught sight of me. He straightened and smoothed his jacket over his breastplate. “Miss Moreau, a pleasure to see you again.”

  Lucy’s head turned to me too, but her scowl didn’t leave. “Good, you’re here. John was just leaving.”

  “Lucy, darling—” he started, but stopped as the scowl on her face deepened. He leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek, but she pulled away and stormed into the dress shop with a wild clatter from the bell.

  The inspector stared at the doorway, looking disheveled and lost.

  “I’ve upset her, I’m afraid,” he said, and then gave a sigh. “And not for the first time.”

  He looked crestfallen, and I searched for words but could only keep staring at his breastplate and thinking of the preposterous fervor I’d witnessed downtown. “You’ve started a fashion trend,” I said. “It seems quite a few people have adopted your penchant for protective garments.”

  He gave a humble shrug. “They think because I’m leading the investigation, I must be a good example to follow. Well, it doesn’t hurt anyone. Perhaps it might even save someone’s life.” I raised an eyebrow doubtfully, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You haven’t reconsidered my offer, have you?” he asked. “I truly would like to close the case on your father. A promotion would help Lucy see me in a…
more favorable light. Especially such a personal case. It might give you some peace of mind, too, Miss Moreau.”

  I pulled my hood higher. “I’m sorry. I appreciate your concern, but I really can’t help you.”

  He looked as though he might say something more, but then changed his mind and opened the door for me. I slipped past him into the dress shop.

  A pair of seamstresses looked up as the bell chimed, as did Lucy, flipping a little angrily through a book of sewing patterns. I sat on a peach-colored chaise, while one of the seamstresses brought me a book of cloth swatches and a tray of biscuits. I halfheartedly felt the various samples of velvets, muslins, silks—they all felt itchy to me.

  “John proposed,” Lucy said at last.

  “Oh my.”

  Her eyes flickered to the seamstresses, whose heads were cocked to eavesdrop, and she pulled me through the silk curtains into the privacy of a small dressing room that smelled of French perfume, with a screen and a stuffed ottoman, which she now flopped onto.

  “He came around last night and told me he’d asked Papa for permission. I turned him down, and Aunt Edith spilled about Henry coming over for tea, and you should have heard the row.” She shuddered at the memory.

  “Lucy, I’m so sorry. Are you quite certain you don’t care for him? He seems…” I fumbled for an appropriately pleasing word. “Responsible.”

  Drat. Responsible would never sway Lucy.

  Her graceful fingers toyed with the ribbons on her gown. I took a deep breath, poised to tell her I also didn’t trust Henry, and that she should stay away from him, when she stood up abruptly.

  “Well. It doesn’t matter. Henry sent me a letter early this morning, telling me he was leaving town and I wouldn’t see him again.” I heard the sting in her voice, though she tried to hide it. “So I couldn’t have had him anyway, even if Papa had approved. That means it’s either John or some fat vicar’s son, I suppose.” Her face grew serious, which didn’t fit with the almost revoltingly cheerful atmosphere of the dressing room.