Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  “Juliet, did you hear me?” His voice was heavy with concern.

  I gave a jerk of a nod. It was all I could manage.

  “Is that a yes?” he asked, as his face broke into a smile.

  My lips parted as I started to contradict him. I had nodded to mean I’d heard him, nothing more. The question of marriage was something I couldn’t answer so easily. Elizabeth had once told the professor marriage was a cage, and I wasn’t certain I entirely disagreed.

  I felt something cold on my finger and looked down to find him slipping the silver ring on my hand. My voice caught, still speechless, and he drew me into his arms and kissed my temple, my forehead, my cheek.

  “I love you,” he breathed.

  I stared at the ring. Good lord, how could I contradict him now? Did I even want to? Marriage was logical for us. I loved him. I wanted him. I thought of him constantly. So why did a part of me feel like I was a runaway train headed for broken tracks?

  I pressed a hand to my corset, wishing I could ease it just an inch. Maybe my fear was only because this had come so suddenly; I’d never doubted my feelings about him before, except for when he’d left me in the dinghy, but we’d put that behind us.

  “I’m happy too,” I said. His question had caught me by surprise, but I could make it work. Just because my own parents had been failures in marriage didn’t mean I was doomed to repeat their mistakes. When I smiled, it was genuine. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

  My voice only trembled slightly, and it was easy to pass it off as girlish nerves.

  His hand tentatively found mine, his thumb absently tracing circles around the silver ring.

  “The easiest decision of my life,” I whispered.

  Though was it?

  Montgomery’s fingers intertwined with mine, still flexing restlessly. Slowly I realized that the source of his agitation no longer had anything to do with Edward; his eyes were drifting over my neckline, gliding over my curves. I had the wild notion that he wanted his hands to be touching all the places his eyes were.

  He leaned in to brush his lips across my cheekbone. My pulse sped at his touch, as my mind drifted to being married and everything it meant… especially the things that married couples did, alone, things that I’d done in a heady rush with Edward but that I’d take my time about with Montgomery.

  My pulse fluttered, a bird without wings. Why was I suddenly so shy around him? It wasn’t as though we hadn’t kissed, hadn’t ever touched each other, and I was hardly innocent when it came to being with men. The house creaked and settled, reminding me that it was empty of servants and Elizabeth. Save for Edward locked in the basement and Balthazar guarding him, it was just us.

  I crossed to the door and shut it. Engaged to Montgomery James, with his heartbreaking blue eyes…

  Montgomery pulled me to him and kissed me so hard the stitches reopened on his arms, and I had to set him down and stitch them up again, but he kept smiling and eventually I laughed too, despite my sins, despite his, despite knowing the King’s Club would be coming for us soon, and he kept kissing me, and time ebbed away before the work was done.

  “My future wife,” he whispered against my cheek.

  His smile only faded at the sound of footsteps on the stairs outside, followed by the sound of the study door thrown open. Elizabeth stood there, snow still caught in the web of her hair.

  I gasped, wiping my face of his kisses.

  “I was out looking for you,” she said as she took in the scene with a deeply wrinkled brow. “Now please tell me where you have been, and why Mr. James is covered in stitches, and most importantly, who the young man is locked in my cellar.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  ELIZABETH WAS THE CLOSEST thing to a mother I had.

  The night that she had combed my hair and told me her memories of my parents had cemented a bond between us. A part of me longed to tell her about the proposal, yet Elizabeth already thought we were engaged, and judging by her face, she was far more concerned with immediate matters.

  We followed her to the library, where she hung her coat by the door while Montgomery and I took our places un­easily on the sofa. My thoughts churned between the ring on my finger, the boy locked downstairs, and how we would possibly explain everything so that she wouldn’t immediately send for the police.

  “Mr. Balthazar retired for the evening,” she said. “I found him guarding the basement door when I came home. You can imagine my surprise to find a man locked in the root cellar. I tried to question Mr. Balthazar, but the poor fellow was quite flummoxed by the whole thing, so I gave him one of the professor’s sleep shirts and showed him to an upstairs bedroom.” She knelt by the cold hearth, a strange expression on her face. “He changed his shirt in front of me. Not a modest one, your friend.” Her eyes slid to mine. “And not like any human I’ve ever seen.”

  I hesitated. Elizabeth was clever—of course she would have realized, with her medical training, that there was something more than odd about Balthazar’s deformities. But did she suspect his true nature? Like her uncle, she had been staunchly against Father’s work, so I couldn’t imagine what she would do if she knew we’d brought one of Father’s walking experiments into her house and had another far more dangerous one locked in the basement.

  “Balthazar’s a good man. He’s no risk to you, I promise,” I said.

  “And the man in the cellar?”

  My silence was its own answer. She raised an eyebrow as she reached for a log for the fireplace. Montgomery protested and offered to build it for her, but she shot him a withering look.

  “I’m quite capable of stacking firewood, Mr. James,” she said, striking a match. “Now, I shall dismiss Mary and Ellis for the rest of the week. I think it best, given the fact you’ve kidnapped someone.” She dusted her soot-blackened hands, then took her seat in a leather chair. “Which one of you would like to explain to me what’s truly going on?”

  Montgomery and I exchanged a glance. He shifted uncomfortably, never having been at ease around Elizabeth. “Tell her as much as you see fit,” he said to me. “I should check on Edward, anyway.” He kissed my cheek before leaving us alone.

  I knew I should speak, but there were too many things to say, and not enough words to convey them. From somewhere outside came the sound of harness bells as a carriage passed, and my head jerked toward the window. Such merriment didn’t belong in this room, not now, with the conversation we faced.

  In the end, Elizabeth spoke first. “My father—the professor’s brother—enjoyed taxidermy. A foul hobby, for sure, but as a girl I idolized him. So I’d plug my nose against the smell and help him with the pelts. I know the difference between animal fur and human hair, Juliet, and your friend upstairs falls into the former category.”

  I swallowed. “Yes. I know.”

  Her voice dropped low, like the hearth’s warmest flames. “He’s one of your father’s experiments, isn’t he? You found your father on that island, and he hadn’t stopped his work at all.”

  To hear it spoken aloud made it true all over again. My secret was out, but perhaps this was for the best. I’d regretted not telling the professor everything. I couldn’t bear to have Elizabeth’s death on my conscience, too. “I thought you would think it impossible.”

  Elizabeth reclined into the leather chair. “Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with the strange things in this world. I told you my family had skeletons in our closet, but I’m afraid it’s more than just our illegitimate lineage. Our ancestors were half mad, and not all of them scrupulous. I’ve read accounts of their travels, and it’s chilling.” She leaned so close to the fire that I was surprised it didn’t burn her face. “All along I suspected your father might succeed, which is why I turned him in.”

  Suddenly the small fire seemed to throw off far too much heat. I was on my feet without thinking. “You started the rumors?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought the professor had turned him in.”

  “The professor was
the one to alert the police, yes,” she said calmly. “But I was the one to start the rumors. You forget that I was friends with your mother. She was a sweet woman, but none too bright. She hadn’t a clue what he was doing down there in the laboratory, but I figured it out rather quickly.” She paused. “I apologize for what happened to you and your mother—it wasn’t my intention that you would be left without resources.”

  I ran a broken fingernail along my lips, thinking. For so many years I’d thought I hated the men who had brought scandal upon my family, and yet all along it had been this one woman, who wasn’t so different from me, who had betrayed him for the good of the world.

  The same reason I’d helped kill him.

  I went to the window. It was still dark of night, and the street below was quiet save for the wind ruffling the garlands. A light turned on in a downstairs window across the street, and I caught a glimpse of a man in a stocking cap heating milk on the stove. My stomach rumbled with more than just hunger.

  “Before my father’s blade, Balthazar began life as a bear and a dog,” I said.

  “And now you call him a man?” she asked.

  Next door, the kitchen light extinguished. “I call him a friend,” I said.

  “And the young man downstairs? Is he a friend as well?”

  “He was, once. Now I can’t say what he is. Father devel­oped a new procedure to change a creature’s composition on a cellular level. He created Edward from a collection of animal parts and human blood, but the results were un­predictable. Edward is a man, but he’s also a monster. It lives within his skin, quite literally.” I paused. “He’s the Wolf of Whitechapel.”

  Elizabeth sat straight up, eyes aflame. “The professor’s murderer? Is that why you’ve brought him here, instead of to the police?” Her voice dropped. “Do you intend to murder him as some sort of revenge?”

  I bit my lip. “I’ll not deny he’s a murderer. He admits to killing many of the Wolf’s victims, but he claims he didn’t kill the professor. It sounds mad, but I’m tempted to believe him.”

  The wind whistled down the chimney and made the fire flicker, and she didn’t take her keen eyes off of me.

  “We can’t turn him over to the police,” I continued. “There’s an organization searching for him, and their plans are worse than anything Father ever imagined. They want to use him to create more creatures like him, which we think are destined for France’s Ministry of Defense. I can only imagine what the military would want with those things. They’re vicious, Elizabeth. Bloodthirsty.”

  Her eyes flickered in that cold way that told me nothing. “What organization?” she asked.

  “They’re called the King’s Club. You’ve heard of them, I’m sure—the professor was a member, though briefly. They want to continue my father’s experimentations, and they’ve already begun. We found a laboratory.”

  She leaned back, thinking. “The King’s Club, involved in all this…”

  “I know it’s difficult to believe,” I said.

  “Oh, I never said that,” she said dryly. “I never trusted a single one of those men, and neither did the professor, which is precisely why he left their ranks. Do you recall hearing about the cholera epidemic of 1854?”

  I nodded, thinking back to the royal decree framed in the King’s Club’s smoking room. “The King’s Men were involved in stopping it, if I recall,” I said. “Part of their charitable work.”

  Elizabeth let out a harsh burst of laughter. “Charitable work? I hardly think so. If anyone benefited from the epidemic, it was the King’s Men’s own bank accounts. The city invested in a new system of waterworks and sewers for the city, and their companies produced all the granite and piping for that project. And I know for a fact that one of their members was a doctor of epidemiology.”

  I leaned closer. “Are you saying they started the epidemic for their own monetary gain?”

  She shrugged a little stiffly. “There’s no evidence, of course, but that’s what the professor suspected.” She leaned back, picking anxiously at her fingernails. “For the last few years they’ve sent representatives around to visit the professor, trying to get him to rejoin, pestering him about our ancestors’ journals. I’m sure that’s what the professor thought Isambard Lessing was after. He must have been shocked when Lessing mentioned your name instead.”

  I tilted my head, thinking of those journals stacked upstairs in the professor’s study. “What’s in those journals that they want so badly?” I asked.

  Elizabeth followed my gaze. “The ones up there collecting dust are nothing but genealogical records. I have the rest of our family’s history at the manor in Scotland, well hidden.” She stood to stir the fire. Her movements had a practiced calm to them that suggested she wasn’t a stranger to midnight surprises such as this. I wondered what exactly her life was like, in the wilds so far north. I suppose a woman living all alone had to be prepared for anything.

  “We need your help,” I said. “Your silence, nothing more. As long as Edward is locked in that cellar, he can’t hurt anyone. We just have to develop a cure for his condition before the King’s Club finds him.”

  “I can certainly offer you my silence,” she said slowly. “And more than that. I’ve developed treatments before. I can help you cure him.”

  The look in her cold blue eyes had softened. I remembered her pressing her lips to my forehead like a mother to a child, and my heart clenched.

  “You’d do that for us?” I whispered.

  She came and sat beside me, touching my hand. “You’re my ward now, Juliet. That means we’re family. My uncle used to say nothing is more important than family.”

  I wasn’t certain what to do with her words. Both my parents had been absent most of my life. I hadn’t any siblings. All my relatives had cast me out. In the last year the word family had come only to mean betrayal, at least until Montgomery’s marriage proposal. Now he would be my family, and I his. But a husband wasn’t the same as a mother, or a father, or a brother. Elizabeth’s words gave me hope for a bond like that again.

  Tentatively, I squeezed her hand.

  THE SKY WAS A thin, hazy gray as we trudged the short few blocks to the funeral at St. Matthew’s Church. Thinking of all those strangers’ faces and whispered rumors caused wracking tremors in my wrists, but I pulled on gloves and ignored the pain. I had promised Elizabeth.

  The professor had been well-known, so I wasn’t surprised to see a long line of fine carriages waiting to drop off attendees. I hadn’t expected, however, the sprawling crowd pressed against the churchyard gates, sailors and vendors and all manner of people dressed in shabby winter coats, whispering hushed rumors into the cold morning air. Two or three wore cheap metal breastplates and clutched smeared news­papers.

  They weren’t there to mourn the professor, I realized with a sickening lurch. They had come to ogle the Wolf’s latest violence. This was a circus to them. A heartless game.

  Montgomery’s hand tightened in mine.

  “How could they?” I whispered fiercely as my joints twisted, angry as my heart. I would have cursed much louder if the crowd hadn’t caught sight of us in our church finery and badgered us with probing questions. Did you see the body, miss? Was there blood? Did ya see the flower?

  I felt at the point of screaming before Montgomery shoved past them to escort Elizabeth and me through the gate. She was the type to go quiet with rage, a dangerous sort. It wasn’t until we were inside the palatial church with the doors firmly closed that color returned to her face.

  “A travesty,” she spat. “If it’s the Wolf they want, it’s the Wolf they deserve.”

  Inside, the crowd wasn’t much better. Hundreds of faces turned at our entrance, all harshly kind, pitying smiles mixed with flickers of scandal in their eyes. Whispers, whispers, whispers. How they must have reveled in the fact that the madman’s daughter was caught up in yet another horrific scandal.

  At least one friendly face caught mine in the crowd: Lucy. She wave
d to me quietly from a pew near the front, where she sat with her parents and Inspector Newcastle. He nodded to me solemnly and then whispered something to Lucy, who looked at him in surprise and shook her head.

  My heart twisted. Surely they weren’t trading rumors too, were they?

  Seats had been saved for the family of the victim in the front row, but I couldn’t bear to sit that close to the casket. Montgomery sat with me in the last row instead, where the preacher’s voice was nothing but a hum, and curious faces kept twisting to look back at me, pretending they were adjusting their fine winter hats.

  Those stolen looks ate away at me until I could no longer bear it. After half an hour, I mumbled something to Montgomery and made my way to a side door, twisting it open to a cloistered courtyard where I gulped fresh air. I stumbled into the snow in my Sunday shoes, weaving between the headstones of the church’s graveyard.

  No faces here, no whispering. Only a freshly dug plot.

  My feet led me to it on their own, knees slumping in the dirt at the foot of his grave. The headstone was plain, unlike most of the others. A testament to his simple life.

  Victor von Stein, it read, 1841–1895. Beloved father and friend.

  I supposed Elizabeth had come up with that phrasing, though if she was referring to me or the professor’s son who had died long ago, I wasn’t sure. The gaping hole awaited the casket. I dug my fingers into the freezing soil, wishing I could hold the professor’s wrinkled old hands instead.

  I’m sorry, Professor, I thought.

  “My condolences, miss,” a voice said behind me.

  I whirled, having thought I was alone. A spindle-thin man wearing a canvas work jacket and a few days’ unshaven beard leaned on a shovel, nodding toward the gravesite. “You must be family,” he said. “You’d be surprised how often family comes out ’ere, needing a moment o’ peace. Reckon he was a great man. Never seen a crowd like this.” He removed his cap in a stiff gesture.