A Cold Legacy

by Shepherd,Megan

  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, only to repeat the process for the next few nights. Finally, I finished reading the last one.

  “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, it was 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 lay 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 the 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 her 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 her play, 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.

  I sighed, holding out a finger to pet the rat. If only she could have maintained that influence on him, maybe everything would have been different.

  The rat ran down my arm onto the bed.

  “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.”

  I sat up, throwing back the blanket. “Just one moment!” I signaled frantically for Lucy to hide the rat. She looked around the room desperately, until she kicked the lid off a hatbox and shoved it inside.

  I opened the door. “A package?”

  Moira grinned. “It’s your wedding dress, miss.”

  I sucked in a breath. Wedding dress? God, the wedding was tomorrow and I hadn’t even bothered to try on those pairs of shoes yet. Guilt washed over me that I’d forgotten about it. Two little girls were with her, smiling widely. She motioned to them apologetically. “They’re dying to see it, Miss. Haven’t ever seen a proper bride’s dress before.”

  The innocent look on their faces made me feel guilty all over again. I forced a smile. “Then let’s take a look, shall we?”

  I tossed one glance back at Lucy before the girls grabbed my hands and led me to the library, where Elizabeth and McKenna stood around the big mahogany table. A package tied with ribbon sat in the middle.

  “The dressmaker just delivered it,” McKenna said, “Oh, do open it. We’re all dying to see.”

  It felt surreal to tug on that bow, slide the ribbon off. The little girls crowded around the table, eyes big and wide. I opened the box, fighting through crumpled newsprint the dressmaker had used to pack the dress, and then delicate tissue paper closer down. I folded back the paper gently, and the girls gasped.

  “Oh, Juliet, it’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said.

  I stared down at the satin dress that Lucy had helped me design. My heart beat a little faster. It wasn’t really so bad that I was lying to Montgomery; I did want to marry him, and it would be a grand occasion. We had a lifetime ahead of us to come to terms with any secrets from our past—or our present.

  “You shall be the most beautiful bride!” the smallest girl said.

  I gave her a sincere grin.

  “Here, girls,” I said, holding up the dress. “Why don’t you try it on? Lily, Moira, it won’t be but slightly too big on you.”

  Grins broke out across all their faces. Lily picked up the dress with the utmost care and they hurried from the room amid giggles. Newspaper stuffing covered the floor. I shoved it back in the box and sank into a chair.

  McKenna went to the window and pulled back the curtain with a frown.

  “Looks like another storm is setting in. Let’s keep our fingers
crossed it comes and goes before Friday afternoon. Rain at a wedding—oh, I couldn’t bear it.”

  “I’m sure it will stop,” Elizabeth said, giving me a smile. “Anyway, a misty day can be perfectly romantic.”

  I smiled in return, torn between how kind they were all being to me, and the fact that I was lying to them all.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  TWENTY-SIX

  THAT EVENING I OPENED the hatbox and took one last look at the rat.

  “Time to take you home, little fellow.” I slid open the back panel of the armoire that led into the passageways in the walls. I climbed into the tight space, finding my way by candlelight to the secret storage room next to Hensley’s chambers. I let the rat into the cage, observing it carefully for fear it might be stronger and unpredictable as Elizabeth had warned, but it acted just like the others. If it wasn’t for the tiny burn mark on its side where the electricity had singed its fur, it would be totally indistinguishable from the others. I bid it good evening and crawled back inside the walls.

  I didn’t return to my room straightaway. The manor was different seen through the cracks in the passageways. Timeless. Without the electric lights I could imagine it was a hundred years ago, and Victor Frankenstein was up in that tower with a lightning rod and a bone saw. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the sound of scalpel on flesh.

  I stopped and leaned against a dusty wall of the passageway to brush away cobwebs on my dress. A thin beam of light shone from between a horizontal crack in the wooden siding. I squinted to peer through. It was Balthazar’s bedroom. He sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace with Sharkey asleep in his lap and a book in his hands. He traced the lines of text with his thick finger, soundlessly mumbling the words to himself.

  I felt bad for spying on him and started to leave, but tripped on one of Lord Ballentyne’s uneven brick traps. I cursed before I could stop myself, and when I looked back through the crack, Balthazar was sniffing the air.

  “Miss Juliet,” he said calmly. “I can smell you in the wall. Is something wrong?”

  “Blast,” I muttered to myself, and then pressed my mouth to the crack. “No, Balthazar, everything’s fine.”

  “It isn’t, Miss. If you forgive me, I can smell that you’re lying. A body produces different scents when one isn’t telling the truth.” He was already out of the chair and had swung opened a hinged section of the wall that served as a hidden door into the passageways. He stuck his head in, sniffing again, and sneezed at all the dust. “Come in, Miss. You’ll scrape yourself up in there. It isn’t safe.”

  “Oh, that’s really fine, I was just . . .” Sneaking through the walls after secretly bringing a rat back to life? “Well, all right.” I paused. “Is it really true that you can smell a lie?”

  “Yes, Miss. When Montgomery and I were traveling the world we developed a signal, because there were plenty of men who wanted to cheat us. I’d tap my nose once for truth and twice for a lie.”

  I climbed into the cozy warmth of his bedroom and shook the dust off my dress. Sharkey wagged his tail. Balthazar offered me the rocking chair but I sat on the rug instead and pulled Sharkey into my lap, scratching behind his ears.

  “How did you know there was a passageway behind that wall?” I asked. “Could you smell that, too?”

  “Aye, Miss,” Balthazar said gruffly, sitting in the rocking chair. “I can smell Master Hensley. Always prowling around in there.”

  “You don’t care for him, do you? I suppose he is a bit unnatural.” I paused as Balthazar scratched his nose with a thick finger—a nose that betrayed his ursine origin. I cleared my throat. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being unnatural, of course.”

  “He doesn’t smell right,” Balthazar said, casting a wary look at the wall. “Mistress Elizabeth asks me to help her in her laboratory sometimes, but I don’t care for it. It makes me uneasy.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  He scratched his nose again, thinking. “She’s the mistress. She’s the law. I must obey her the same as I must obey Montgomery, the same as I obeyed your father.” He raised a hand and let it fall helplessly. I had never quite put it together before, but now Balthazar’s constant obedience made sense. He was part dog, after all, and well trained to be loyal to anyone he viewed as a master. Faintly, I wondered if that included me.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, hoping to change the subject away from experimentation.

  He held up the book. “Aristotle. I like the messages he talks about. I wanted to reflect on the duties you’ve asked of me for your wedding day tomorrow. I pray that I’ll do a good job.”

  I smiled. “I’m positive you will. How did you learn about Aristotle?”

  He ran his hand along the spine of the book. “I started reading it on your father’s island.”

  Just the mention of my father’s island sent a shiver down my back. I hugged my arms around my knees. “I don’t recall seeing Aristotle on Father’s bookshelves. There was only a handful of books there, most of them Shakespeare.”

  “He had more in the laboratory,” Balthazar said. “There was a room off the back filled with books and old paperwork.”

  A curious tickled whispered in the back of my head. I’d been so captivated by Elizabeth’s science and my impending wedding that the Beast’s warning had been the furthest thing in my mind, present but set aside like needlework I’d always intended to come back to and had only now remembered. Ask Montgomery about your father’s laboratory files on the island, he had said. About the ones you didn’t see. He burned a file along with a letter.

  “You didn’t ever see a letter my father wrote to me that Montgomery burned, did you?”

  Balthazar gave a heavy shake of his head, distracted by a torn page in the book he was trying to glue back together with a gooey lick of saliva.

  “What exactly was in those files in the second room?” I pressed.

  The sharp tone in my voice caught Balthazar’s attention. He looked up with his heavy jowls, between me and Sharkey, and scratched his nose. “Files, miss? What files?”

  “You just said there was a second room filled with files.” He scratched his nose harder, a sure sign he was hiding the truth. “Balthazar, I know there’s something Montgomery isn’t telling me. Something he’s lying about.”

  His big eyes went wide. He said nothing.

  I studied him closely, the way he fidgeted with the book, shifting uncomfortably beneath my scrutiny. He started rocking in the chair, almost imperceptibly at first. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “Balthazar, why did Montgomery burn a letter? What was in it?”

  His lips folded together nervously, and he rocked harder. I’d seen Balthazar rock that way only once before, on the Curitiba when I had asked him about my father. His eyes had glazed over. I’d get no answer out of him now.

  I sighed and stood, heading for the main door back into the manor’s hallway. I was done with secrets and passageways, at least for tonight. I had a wedding to think about.

  “Good night, Balthazar,” I said, and closed the door behind me. Thunder shook the windows outside the hallway, and I pushed the curtain back. Lightning crashed.

  Looks like another storm is setting in, McKenna had said.

  Lightning—we needed it in order to bring a human body back to life. There was no telling when another storm would come, or how much longer Edward’s body would stay preserved down there in the cellar.

  Whatever Montgomery was hiding, was it worse than what I was hiding from him?

  I went to Lucy’s door and knocked quietly. “If we’re going to bring Edward back,” I told her, “it has to be tonight.”

  ONCE THE STAFF HAD gone to bed, we crept downstairs. The basement was flooded from all the rain. Water seeped in from the stone walls, filling the low-lit hallways with the sound of dripping and t
he smell of damp. Luckily the chapel was built on slightly higher ground so the stone floor—and the bodies—remained dry.

  Lucy made a face and lifted her skirts, checking each step carefully. Inside the chapel, we set down the lantern and looked at the dozen bodies. Lucy pulled the sheet back over Edward’s face.

  “Do you think he’ll remember what it was like to be dead?” There was a ring of excitement in her voice that I hadn’t heard in weeks.

  “I suppose we shall have a good many questions to ask him, when he wakes. Now, if we’re going to cut out Edward’s diseased posterior lobe, we have to hurry. I’m getting married tomorrow, after all. We’ll need a replacement brain from one of these bodies. The cadaver should be in good condition. Male and around his age, if possible.”

  Lucy drew back another sheet and grimaced. “What about this one?”

  I glanced at the corpse of a young man who seemed healthy enough—present condition excluded, of course—with gangly long arms and legs that draped off the end of the bench.

  “Goodness, he must be seven feet tall. But he looks healthy enough. Help me carry him.”

  Lucy took the lantern in one hand and picked up the man’s feet with the other, while I wrapped my arms under his shoulders. The body had a distinct odor—a sterile coldness not so different from the damp stone walls. A trace of soap from his shirt lingered and reminded me that he had been a person with hopes and dreams that had ended far too young.

  Lucy grunted as she lifted the man’s feet. “Is he filled with bricks?” she muttered.

  “Bodies feel heavier when they’re stiff.”

  She let his feet fall back to the bench. “I’m not going to ask how you know that. What do we do? We can’t possibly carry him on our own.”