Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  Outside, church bells chimed midnight. I thought of the family across the street, tucked into warm beds, the children dreaming of waking in the morning to toys wrapped in big red bows. All over the city, families like theirs slumbered. Families that wouldn’t sleep nearly so deeply if they knew what was happening in those basement laboratories of King’s College.

  I swallowed. My plan was a cruel one, dangerous, yet I couldn’t deny that the curious corners of my soul curled at the thought: Maybe the best way to prevent the King’s Club from enacting their plan was to enact it for them, and show them—and the world—exactly what would happen if my father’s science was unleashed.

  FORTY-ONE

  I WOKE TO THE sounds of Saint Paul’s bells ringing in Christmas Day.

  I had stayed up half the night going through the details of my plan. Lucy slept over after sending a note home to her mother and was now fast asleep in the sea of pillows on my bed. I made a list of three King’s Men—Inspector John Newcastle, Dr. Hastings, and Isambard Lessing—and when she woke, told her to write an urgent message to each one in her father’s forged handwriting, calling for an emergency meeting at precisely nine o’clock in the evening and not to be a moment late. When she asked to what purpose, I refused to say. Still half asleep, with the trust of a lifelong friend, she did as I asked regardless.

  In the meanwhile, I gave Edward another injection of valerian to keep him sedated, then pored over every word in Father’s journal and letters, studying his procedures, focusing on the science the King’s Club was trying to duplicate. For the first time I allowed myself to truly delve into it, guiltlessly, and the genius of his work made my whole body feel alive.

  Elizabeth paced around the house like an unquiet ghost, throwing wide-eyed glances at the cellar door, never far from the musket and bottle of gin. In the afternoon Lucy left with Balthazar to deliver each of the letters personally, with instructions for her to meet back at the professor’s house in the evening. The final step in my preparations involved Montgomery, but when I asked him to get his medical bag and come with me to King’s College, he didn’t obey as unquestioningly as Lucy had.

  “You must tell me what this is all about,” he said. “I’m to be your husband. You must trust me.”

  I bristled at the word husband, still unused to the idea despite how much I loved him.

  “That trust goes both ways,” I said. “Once we’re there, I promise to make everything clear. You said once that before we are wed, you want no more shadows in our lives. Tonight I can end all our fears about the King’s Men and Edward falling into dangerous hands.” I held his hand, squeezing hard. “But I can’t do it alone.”

  He leaned in, resting his forehead against mine, and the feel of him so close kindled the coldest parts of my body.

  “Come with me,” I whispered. “I need you.”

  The tensed muscles in his back eased. “You know I’d follow you anywhere. Though I fear we’ll both end up damned.”

  We left Elizabeth to keep an eye on Edward and slipped out the back alleyway under cover of darkness. As we darted down the lanes, I peeked into open windows. Each one showed a different vignette of city life. A stout family shared a feast of ham and bread pudding amid the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree. A wife baked a meat pie for her husband. A young woman tucked a baby into a bassinet under a sprig of mistletoe.

  We’re doing this for them, I told myself. To keep power out of the hands of the King’s Club.

  At last we reached the imposing brick archway of King’s College. On Christmas Day the place was deathly quiet, no horses or harness bells or students tromping around. We climbed the main stairs and I used a poured-tin copy I’d made of Radcliffe’s key to allow us entry. As I’d anticipated, not even Mrs. Bell and her cleaning crew were working. Only faint moonlight filled the long hallways, even the dust having long settled.

  I jerked my head for Montgomery to follow me.

  The halls threw loud echoes of our footsteps as we hurried down the marble floor. He headed for the King’s Club smoking room, but I grabbed his hand.

  “Wait. Come with me to the basement first.”

  His face hardened. He knew, as I did, what those subterranean hallways held. But he followed me without argument, trusting me, and we took the stairs into the basement that smelled of sawdust, where the windowless halls held a darkness thick as fogged breath, and then we climbed even lower to the subbasement level where the stone walls smelled of ancient times. I felt along the wall until my fingers brushed the doorknob of the King’s Club’s secret laboratory, but Montgomery stopped me.

  “Wait, Juliet.” In the darkness, his voice was dis­embodied. “Tell me what you are planning, first.”

  “Come inside, and I will.” I pushed open the door and lit a match to illuminate the various lanterns, which threw circles of light onto the tanks of liquid and the ungodly beasts suspended within. With one glance, I could tell they had grown in the week since we’d been here. They now had inch-long claws and powerful jaws that could snap a man’s bone in one bite.

  It was better than I had hoped.

  “This is what I wanted to show you,” I said. “These creatures. All this time we’ve tried so hard to keep the King’s Club from catching Edward, but they’ll never stop. So we’re going to finish the King’s Club’s work for them.” I curled my hands into fists, my fingernails digging into my own skin. “They wanted a monster. Let’s give it to them.”

  “ARE YOU MAD?” MONTGOMERY asked, closing the laboratory door behind him as though afraid someone would overhear us. “That is exactly what we’ve been trying to prevent from happening.”

  “Yes, trying to prevent by keeping things secret. But don’t you see—secrets are their ally. The moment rumors spread about Father’s research was the moment his work in London ended. If the public knew the truth about what the King’s Club was endeavoring to accomplish, they’d never stand for it. Imagine the newspaper headlines. So many illustrious men, captains of industry, even Scotland Yard’s most promising detective—all in on this conspiracy. They’d be banished. Arrested. Even if some of them escaped the courts, they’d never dare pick up a scalpel again.”

  “Your father did.” Montgomery stepped closer. “Say they’re banished, or let off with a light sentence. What’s to stop them from fleeing to an island of their own?”

  “Don’t flatter them,” I answered, perhaps too harshly. “My father was a genius. Half of the King’s Club members are only pawns. Radcliffe was never a man of science; he just saw this as another investment. They don’t have the brilliance, nor the drive. If we expose them, their families will be shamed. They’ll lose their social standing, their credit. They’ll move on to some other, respectable scheme—investing in agriculture, promoting some new politician—and curse themselves for ever getting involved in my father’s work.”

  I glanced at the water tanks before continuing. “The ones who are truly dangerous are the few who aren’t doing this for financial advantage but for sheer scientific hubris. There are twenty-four King’s Men, but I gave Lucy a list of only three names: Inspector Newcastle, Dr. Hastings, and Isambard Lessing. The ones who are scientists, the ones who might dare to consider dabbling in Father’s realm again, the ones who would murder to get what they want, or experiment on humans—those are the ones who can’t be allowed to continue at any cost. Without those three, the others will scatter.”

  Montgomery studied me very carefully. “What do you intend to do to those three?”

  When I turned toward the water tanks as an answer, he grabbed my arm a little roughly. Ever since learning that Edward was his own blood relation, he’d seemed to stop thinking in such stark terms. In a way it was as though we had swapped places, he now more concerned with the gray parts of life, and me with the black and the white.

  “You’re going to kill those men, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Not necessarily,” I said, drawing a vial out of my pocket. “I only want to show th
em the dangers of what they’re doing. I extracted this from Edward this morning while I gave him a shot of sedative. It’s twenty milligrams of his spinal fluid. Not enough to harm him, but enough to bring five of these creatures to awareness. We’ll lock the men and the creatures together in the smoking room upstairs.”

  Montgomery’s jaw went very hard. “They’ll die.”

  I tried to keep my voice steady, though my heart was fluttering with a dangerous kind of excitement. “Perhaps they will—that’s what they deserve. Or perhaps the King’s Men will be able to defend themselves. We have no idea what will happen, and that’s the beauty of it. Leave it up to nature. Survival of the fittest.”

  Montgomery drew a hand over his face. “It’ll be a bloodbath.”

  “All the better if it is.” I whispered the words, because such words were never meant to be spoken. “Imagine the spectacle in the newspaper. You know how the public hungers for blood—it’s why they’ve gone into such a fervor over the Wolf. The King’s Men control the London Times, but not the other newspapers. They’ll call it the Christmas Massacre at King’s College, or something with an equally macabre ring. Everyone in the city—the entire country—will know the truth about what they were trying to do.”

  The blood had drained from Montgomery’s face, and yet he hadn’t left, nor had he called me mad and broken off the engagement. “And the creatures?” he asked.

  I rested my hand on the nearest glass tank. “We kill them after it’s done. We haven’t a choice. We both know any creature of my father’s is fated to die either way.”

  I tried hard not to think about Edward. Or Balthazar. Or myself.

  Montgomery let out a weary sigh. “Hunting them down, just like on the island. I thought all that was behind me.”

  “We’ll inject them with a large dose of stimulant that will stop their hearts after ten minutes. No hunting, no shooting. They’ll die quietly. That’s more mercy than the King’s Club would have shown them.”

  He leaned on the worktable. “You have it all figured out, don’t you?” There was an edge to his voice. He looked over the creatures in the tanks, his blond hair slipping loose and veiling his face. “There must be some other way. If we just destroyed the specimens…”

  “They’d make more.”

  “We could warn the authorities about their plans for the paupers’ ball.”

  “They are the authorities. Newcastle controls the police, and the members of Parliament have control over the military.”

  He sighed, still unwilling to accept that my plan was the only option. “It makes me think of Edward, how I was so certain he had to die. Then I learned that we share the same blood, and it changed something. I’m tired of killing, Juliet. Man or creature.”

  I placed my hands over his. “I wish there was another way too,” I said. “But I’ve thought it through. It has to be this.”

  “You’ve never operated on one of these things. You’ve only seen it happen, and as I recall it was enough to send you running into the jungle in horror.”

  “I won’t run this time,” I said quietly.

  I could still see the hesitation written in the tense muscles of his neck. I walked over to the wall and took down two leather aprons. I slid one over my head and cinched it at the waist, then handed Montgomery the other.

  “I swore I’d never touch a scalpel again,” he whispered.

  “You don’t have to touch a scalpel,” I said. “I’ve studied Father’s journal. I know every word he wrote about the procedures.” I held out the vial of Edward’s spinal fluid. “All we have to do is inject them with this material, and then stress the bodies with an electric shock. No cutting. No slicing. The electric current will weaken the cells to allow the material to permeate, which will bring them to life. We’ll awaken five and poison the rest, then throw all the journals and instructions into the tank with them. The chemicals will destroy the writing.”

  Montgomery leaned on the counter, studying the blood-red liquid in the vial. I would have paid dearly to know what was going through his mind. Did he think I was lying to myself? If he did, he was wrong. This had nothing to do with besting Father’s work, or even giving the King’s Men the cruel justice they deserved. This was about that family next door on Dumbarton Street, and the girls at Lucy’s teas, and Mrs. Bell and her cleaning crew. There was still beauty in the world, still innocence.

  I squeezed Montgomery’s arm. “We can’t let them win. We’re to be married, and we’ve Edward, who’s practically your brother, and Elizabeth, who’s my guardian now. If you won’t do it for the good of the city, do it for them.”

  His hand took mine, circled the silver ring. He spun it a few times, thinking, and then let my hand fall. He tied the loose strands of his hair back and glanced at the chemistry equipment. “Go through the cabinets and look for a neural stimulant. We’ll need at least a hundred milligrams per creature to ensure their heart rates increase enough to give out after ten minutes.” His voice was flat, unemotional. He paused. “How exactly do you intend to transport five ravenous creatures with claws and sharp teeth to the upstairs smoking room?”

  I swallowed. “I have a plan for that. It sounds a bit mad, but hear me out. The entire upstairs was fitted with electricity within the last two years. They had to run the electric wires in external casings along the walls. It won’t be hard to expose a bit of wire. Enough to provide an electric shock if attached to living flesh.” I paused. “The King’s Men won’t notice a few more animal bodies among all that taxidermy. Once they go in and flip on the lights…”

  Montgomery looked torn between sickness over what I was proposing and a strange sort of admiration. I swallowed back the part of me that was secretly thrilled by my plan.

  Montgomery selected five of the healthiest-looking specimens, while I searched through the cabinets for a neural stimulant strong enough to kill the creatures after ten minutes. He handed me a needle.

  Together, we brought to fruition the terrible plans of the King’s Club.

  FORTY-TWO

  EVEN WITHOUT SURGERY, THE work was a grisly task.

  The creatures in the tanks might have been created in an ungodly way, but their little bodies were warm with life. Each weighed perhaps twenty-five pounds, not so different from holding Sharkey in my arms. The liquid within the tanks wasn’t water, but rather a viscous chemical bath that clung to my leather apron and dress. As we laid the creatures out on the table, fluid dripping off their drenched fur and onto the floor, my heart twisted.

  Sometimes you have to embrace the darkness to stop it, I reminded myself.

  On the island, Father’s ratlike creatures had been hairless, but these had a line of fur down the spine thick as quills. The creatures’ eyelids were nearly translucent, showing a web of threading veins above eyes that would soon open for the first time. I dried the creatures with a towel as tenderly as if I was giving Sharkey a bath. Damned though they were, I couldn’t bear to abuse them any more than they already had been.

  As soon as I’d finished, Montgomery showed me where to inject them at the base of their spines, explaining how the central blood system was separated from the brain and spinal column by a membrane.

  The syringe trembled in my hand.

  It was I—not Father—giving life now.

  I set the needle at the base of the first creature’s spine, counting the vertebrae. The tank’s fluid had kept their skin soft and thin, revealing rivers of purple veins beneath the surface. I pierced the skin gently and worked the needle until it hit the spinal sac. It was thicker than I’d imagined, and I had to thrust my hand to puncture it. Then I depressed the lever, breathing life into the thing on the table.

  “The next one,” Montgomery called over his shoulder, while he gathered all the notes and journals and plunged them into the viscous tank liquid to destroy them. “Hurry, before the stimulant starts to wear off.”

  I finished the injections. The creatures looked so strange, caught in this half-life. Bodies s
o perfect and yet breathless, pulseless, waiting in stasis for that one spark to set off the reaction that would start their hearts.

  We carried them up two flights of stairs to the King’s Club smoking room, where we worked by candlelight. Amid the taxidermied wildlife, a few more motionless bodies wouldn’t be noticed. I set the last one on top of the mantel, the focal point of the room, where I hoped Newcastle would be standing when the creatures first woke.

  This is for the professor, I thought with grim satisfaction.

  Montgomery used his knife to pull away the electric wiring from the walls. He knew a thing or two about electrical systems and showed me how to make certain both the positive and negative wires touched the creatures’ flesh.

  We worked in silence, so when I heard a rustle of clothing behind me I nearly jumped.

  Lucy stood in the doorway, Balthazar behind her, the two of them silhouettes in the dark hallway. Lucy’s hand reached for the electric light switch.

  “Don’t!” I cried.

  Her hand hovered above the switch. “It’s dark as night in here with just those candles. What on earth are you doing?”

  I rushed over to her. “My god, don’t touch the lights! What are you doing here, Lucy? We were supposed to meet back at the professor’s.”

  “I had to know what you were planning,” she said, as she looked around the room, not yet noticing the few extra animal bodies among the rest. “I’m involved in this too. My father—”

  “Is out of town,” I interrupted. “He won’t be affected by what we’re doing, at least not immediately. Once he returns and learns that the King’s Club has been exposed, he’ll be the first to denounce his association with them.”

  “You’re exposing them? How?”

  She tried to see what Montgomery was doing on the mantel, but I pulled her into the hallway. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Around a quarter till nine,” she said. “I delivered the letters. Those three men should be here shortly.”