A Cold Legacy

by Megan Shepherd

  I turned back to the building looming in the twilight. Lights were just coming on as the servants prepared dinner.

  Anyone would want to oversee such a place, and yet I felt only hollowness in my chest. I wished Jack Serra were back, with his cryptic predictions.

  Was running Ballentyne truly my fate?

  A fox yipped behind me, reminding me that I was alone and that night was falling. I wrapped my sweater tightly and jogged back to the manor just in time to change clothes and get ready for dinner with the staff. Elizabeth had decided to forgo tradition and let the servant girls dine with us at the grand table. I loved having them there. They drilled me with questions about the wedding: what type of flowers I liked and what my dress looked like and if they could try it on when it arrived and pretend they were to be brides as well.

  Lucy’s seat, however, remained empty.

  Halfway through dinner, I leaned toward Montgomery. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Balthazar said she isn’t feeling well and decided to skip dinner.”

  After the meal, I wrapped some cold chicken in a napkin to take to her room, but when I opened the door, no one was there.

  A strange feeling trickled down my back. Lucy had been acting odd since Edward’s death, first slaughtering the Beast with that wild look in her eye, now throwing herself so fully into work. Thinking back on it, it didn’t make sense. Lucy hated work. And she wasn’t the type to fall so deeply in love as she had with Edward, only to watch dry-eyed at his funeral.

  Maybe my worries were more than just suspicions.

  I hurried down the hall, peeking in keyholes, not finding her anywhere. I went to Elizabeth’s laboratory, but it was locked and I knew Lucy didn’t have a key. I scoured the observatory and the winter garden, and finally went down to the cellar.

  I found her there. She was leaning over Edward’s body, head bent in prayer. My heart faltered for a moment. This must be where she was disappearing to when she’d been claiming to work or to be ill. She came here to mourn in private, so she could appear strong in public. My heart ached; I’d do anything to take away her pain.

  “Lucy,” I whispered.

  She jerked upright, breathing hard in the cold air. “Juliet! Are you trying to make me die from shock?”

  I took another step closer. A book was open on the floor. I had assumed it was a prayer book, but on closer inspection I saw anatomical drawings. She scrambled to shut the book and pick up various instruments, including the missing scalpel from Elizabeth’s laboratory.

  “Lucy, what are you doing?” My voice was harder now.

  Her face went white. She tried to block Edward’s body from my view, and alarm bells went off in my head. I pushed past her and stopped short.

  It wasn’t Edward.

  It was the body of one of the vagrants, a boy about Edward’s height and age. The shroud had been drawn back to reveal his bare chest, which was marked in dotted lines following the anatomy book. A line of cut flesh ran down his center. There was little blood—the body was too cold. The cut line was unsteady and imprecise, made with hands that had never done such work before and were hesitant to try.

  I lost the feeling in my fingertips. “Lucy, what have you done?”

  She jumped up and pressed her hand over my mouth as though she feared I might scream. “Shh, Juliet,” she whispered, face even whiter. “I was just . . . I thought I might try . . .”

  She was normally so good at lying. I’d seen her lie effortlessly to suitors and to her own parents. But now she stared at me, blood drained from her cheeks, without a single explanation as to why she was cutting open a stranger’s body with a stolen scalpel.

  “Blast,” she cursed, dropping her hand. “Don’t tell anyone. Not Montgomery. Certainly not Elizabeth.”

  I looked around at the other bodies, noticed some of the other sheets disturbed, a few drops of congealed blood on the floor. This clearly wasn’t the first time she’d come down here with the scalpel and an anatomy book. And there was only one reason why she’d do something so gruesome: she was trying to teach herself basic surgery by practicing on the vagrants’ bodies. All in an effort to bring Edward back.

  “Lucy, you can’t mutilate strangers, even if they’re dead!” I hissed, low and frantic. “Have you gone mad?”

  “It’s the only way!” she pleaded. “You refused to help me, and Elizabeth has that oath of hers, and I know Montgomery wouldn’t do it. I don’t understand how you all can just let Edward’s body rest down here, knowing there’s a cure. He’s dead now—there are no more hurdles. No questions of morality. We could bring him back, Juliet.”

  “No questions of morality?” I pressed my hand to Jack Serra’s charm beneath my dress. I had gotten to know my demons and been tempted to bring Edward back, but that was before I’d witnessed Hensley’s horrible show of violence. “What about Hensley? You’ve seen him. He’s hardly a normal child. There’s no telling if the procedure would even work, but if it did, who’s to say Edward wouldn’t be like Hensley, his mind as simple as a child’s but his body able to kill so easily?”

  “It isn’t the same thing at all,” she argued. “Hensley died and was reanimated as a child, so of course his mind stayed the same. Edward’s an adult. And besides, the professor was distraught when he brought Hensley back, so it’s only natural that he made mistakes.”

  “And you think you wouldn’t make mistakes? Lucy, you’ve never done any of this before! This is highly skilled science. Only trained surgeons could perform such a procedure.”

  “I don’t know what else to do!” She collapsed on one of the benches near Edward, burying her head in her hands. “I know I don’t have the skill, but I can’t sit around giggling about your wedding while the boy I wished to marry someday is dead. He could be back with us, Juliet. Cured of the Beast. How can you say you don’t want that?”

  I stared at her in the flickering electric lights, afraid of the look in her eyes, and even more afraid of how much sense she was making. Had I been heartless not even to consider bringing Edward back? What a fool I’d been, planning my own wedding, acting as though everything was fine and we’d all have a grand future together, when one of us was gone.

  I sank onto the bench opposite her. Edward’s body lay between us, still shrouded, with Balthazar’s paper flower resting on the center of his chest. I dared to let myself peel back the shroud to get one final look at him.

  His face was so familiar it made my chest ache. He’d survived days alone at sea. He’d survived the fire in my father’s burning island compound. He’d even survived an attempt to poison himself. He’d escaped death so many times that it didn’t feel real to see him like this, cold and lifeless.

  I studied the lines of his face, trying to read his fortune, just like Jack Serra had read mine. The water charm felt heavy around my neck.

  Lucy would never have the skill to bring Edward back, no matter how many bodies she practiced on, but I might. I had watched Elizabeth reanimate the rat, and the procedure was well documented in Frankenstein’s Origin Journals. I’d have to practice on other creatures first of course—Lucy had been smart on that count. I could start with the dead rats, then move to one of these cadavers. I wouldn’t bring it fully back—that would be too dangerous. But I could hook the body up to the machines, test the procedure out, and make certain I understood how the operation worked. As to fixing Edward’s broken body—repairing his heart, swapping out the diseased part of his brain, sewing back the incision mark across his throat—I had seen the medical notations Elizabeth made on all of her transplants. I’d watched her transplant Moira’s new eye. If I could get those notes, and the Origin Journals, I could study them.

  It was possible—quite possible—that I could reanimate Edward.

  I stood abruptly, scared even by how far I had let my own fantasies unfurl.

  Lucy looked at me with wide eyes. “You’re considering it, aren’t you?”

  I grabbed the anatomy book and the scalpel, wr
apped both in a sheet, and hugged the bundle to my chest. I shook my head a little too hard. “No, Lucy. I couldn’t go against Elizabeth’s wishes. This is her house.”

  “But you could do it, couldn’t you?”

  I recognized that feverish look in her eye because it matched my own. Just like my father’s voice, urging me to do something remarkable instead of living a quiet life.

  This is how you shall be exceptional, my father’s voice said. By defeating death to save a life.

  I hurried from the cellar, afraid to face Lucy any longer. Upstairs I nearly collided with Montgomery in the kitchen. He frowned at the bundle clutched in my arms.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  I glanced at the table where the samples for our wedding cakes still rested, minus a few bites. They had tasted delicious at the time, but now all that seemed foolish.

  “I think I might have caught whatever Lucy’s sick with.” It wasn’t a lie. My stomach threatened to turn at the sugary smell of the cakes. I hurried upstairs to my bedroom, where I twisted the key in the lock and let the bundle fall onto the floor.

  The scalpel fell out, still caked with dried blood.

  The idea had already taken hold of me, and it wasn’t as easy to dig it back out again. It was as addicting as a drug, beautiful and promising and so, so dangerous that I hesitated to even look at it directly. It was an idea that could change everything.

  Already my fingers were itching to try. Isn’t this what I’d been craving, deep down where I didn’t want to admit it? Since I’d first learned about Frankenstein’s science, since I’d first seen Hensley brought back to life. My father’s spirit was in my veins, urging me to do this. Suddenly the memory of the carnival I’d attended when I was a little girl returned to me: flashes of a man with skin like scales and a little boy with black fur covering his face. I’d gone to the freak show tent with my father. He’d given me a caramel apple and explained the monstrosities’ various afflictions.

  No matter how much Montgomery pushed me to be like my mother, he was wrong. Only my father’s legacy could guide me now. Father had created man out of animal, but he’d never conquered death before. I could.

  I took out Jack Serra’s water charm. Perhaps this was what his cryptic fortune meant: a stream and a river are made of the same substance, and yet the river has the potential to be so much stronger. The river always surpassed the stream—just as I would surpass my father. Only I’d use his science for good.

  I closed my eyes, squeezing the charm. I felt like it was giving me permission, even pushing me toward fulfilling my fate.

  I snuck up to Lucy’s room and knocked quietly. In the low light of a few flickering candles, our eyes met.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll bring him back.”

  She threw her arms around me so tightly I could hardly breathe. “I knew I could count on you to see reason.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE DAY OF MY wedding approached, and yet I could think of little else but bringing Edward back. All I had needed was permission, and that’s what decoding Jack Serra’s fortune had given me. I knew what Montgomery would say if I told him—that fortunes were only a way for us to impose our hearts’ own desires—but so be it. If this was my heart’s true desire, I couldn’t deny it any longer.

  Lucy conspired to help me sneak away from wedding planning whenever I could, tiptoeing into the hidden alcoves in the walls and reading by candlelight every book I found in the library on anatomy and galvanism, though I already knew most of the information by heart. It was the Origin Journals I needed, the ones Elizabeth kept hidden.

  “I know this is probably silly,” I told Elizabeth after dinner, dropping my voice conspiratorially. “But Balthazar was telling me about some old journals he’d found while tidying up the manor. Said there was quite a bit of German in them. I know you keep the Origin Journals well hidden, but I thought you might want to make certain he hadn’t accidentally found them.”

  Her eyes went wide for an instant; then she dismissed the notion with a wave. “He must have stumbled upon other old volumes. Lord knows there’s no shortage of dusty books around here.”

  But there was uncertainty in her eyes, just as I knew there would be. That night, after the household went to bed, I crawled into the passages and peeked through all the spy holes until I found her in her bedroom. She climbed silently up the stairs to her observatory. I followed in the walls and watched through a small hole. She went to the globe with the hidden compartment where she kept her Les Étoiles gin, knelt down, and opened the bottom half—a second hidden compartment.

  She took out three dusty leather-bound books, checked them quickly to make certain no one had touched them, and then stowed them away again. As soon as she left, I crawled through a trapdoor and took them. I stayed awake all night reading over them in fascination and copying important sections, then replaced them in the morning so they wouldn’t be missed.

  “I’ve learned all I can from the books,” I told Lucy. “Elizabeth’s going to Quick tonight to telegraph Jack Serra in London to see if he’s discovered anything. Come with me to the laboratory after everyone’s gone to bed. It’s time for us to practice.”

  She pressed a hand to her mouth, whether to hold in fear or excitement, I couldn’t tell. I imagined that, like me, she felt a combination of the two. All through dinner I could scarcely keep my hands from twitching, thinking about working the controls of the machine in Elizabeth’s laboratory. It wasn’t storming, so I’d have to reanimate something small, like a bird or a small mammal, that wouldn’t require lightning.

  Once everyone had gone to bed, I left my room quietly and was accosted by Lucy—she’d been waiting for me on pins and needles. We tiptoed to the south tower and up the winding stairs.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I whispered to her. “We can’t give Elizabeth any suspicions that we’ve been here. Stand next to the table and wait for me to tell you what to do.”

  She nodded and I unlocked the door. We closed the curtains, using only shaded candles so any girls wandering outside wouldn’t see a light on in the tower. The laboratory was just as I’d remembered, tidy and comfortable. Lucy held the candles up to the row of surgical instruments, the flame reflecting both in their metal blades and in her wide eyes.

  “I can’t believe she’s operated on all the servants,” Lucy said. “They seem so normal.”

  “They are normal,” I answered. “They’re just people who needed a little help beyond the realm of conventional medicine. They aren’t like father’s creations. Besides, you like Balthazar, and he’s as abnormal as they come.”

  She reached out to touch a pair of clamps but paused, remembering my instructions. “Balthazar’s different. No one in the world could dislike him, even if they tried.”

  I went to the glass jar. As I suspected, the latest of Hensley’s victims were there: three rats to chose from. I smelled them to see which was the freshest, and gently probed their bones to determine which had been suffocated, which would be far easier to reanimate. The ones he had crushed to death would require intricate bone setting that would take too long.

  I found a good specimen and set it on the table. Lucy made a face.

  “You like Edward, too,” I reminded her. “He’s also one of Father’s creations.”

  She lifted a shoulder in a helpless shrug. “I don’t care how he was made, or how I was made, or how the trees outside were made. All that matters is what we are now. In Edward’s case, what he’ll be once we cure him of the Beast.”

  I pointed to the lever attached to the windmill controls. “On my mark, give that a solid pull.”

  I delicately laid the rat on the table and hooked up the various wires. At its slight weight, how easy it would be to smother it all over again. I wondered if such thoughts had ever crossed Father’s mind as he worked. Did he smooth his hands over the puma’s matted fur before he shaved it off? Had he marveled at a tiny eyelid, a little claw, and felt wonder at t
he natural world before he tried to bend it to his own will?

  “It’s your lucky day, little rat,” I said softly.

  I signaled to Lucy, and she pulled the lever.

  THAT NIGHT, LONG AFTER we had carefully cleaned Elizabeth’s laboratory of any signs of our presence, Lucy and I huddled in my bed under the blanket with the live rat. It was incredible to see a creature that only hours ago was a lifeless cadaver now sniffing at the corn kernels we left for it. Even Lucy, who hated rats, seemed enchanted.

  As I watched Lucy play with it, my thoughts turned to my parents.

  Perhaps Father’s madness had always been a part of him, but it hadn’t fully manifested until he’d left London for the island. I remembered him so clearly back then, at fancy dinners and garden parties and lectures in our salon. He’d been determined, but not mad. There had been one party in particular, summertime in the back garden, when Montgomery and I had played hide-and-seek among the azaleas. We’d heard angry voices and peeked out from the branches to see Father arguing with one of his students. I’d never seen him so cross: red face, eyes glassy, a string of expletives that made Montgomery reach over to cover my ears. Mother had come and whispered soothing words into Father’s ear. The anger had melted off his face. Mother had such a calming influence on him, once upon a time. If only she could have maintained that influence on him, maybe everything would have been different.

  I sighed, holding out a finger to pet the rat.

  “We can’t keep it,” I told Lucy. “If we let it run wild, Sharkey or one of the barn cats will kill it.”

  “What do we do, then? Return it to the cage with the others?”

  “I suppose. Elizabeth warned me that reanimated creatures might have unnatural strength like Hensley, but it’s just a rat, and it seems perfectly normal.”

  A knock came at the door and we froze. I threw off the covers to find daylight streaming through the windows. Morning had come sooner than I’d realized.

  “Miss Juliet?” Moira’s voice came from the other side of the door. “You might want to come downstairs. A package just arrived from Quick.”