A Cold Legacy

by Shepherd,Megan

  Montgomery’s jaw tightened. For a flash, there was fear in his eyes. It was the same look he’d given me in London when I’d proposed bringing the water-tank creatures back to life.

  He leaned in, the fire throwing shadows over his face. “Don’t even think such things, Juliet.”

  I took a step away from him, hair wild, pacing just out of his reach. “Why not? They’d be loyal to me, even more loyal than the servants are to Elizabeth. She only gave them back their hands or eyesight; I’d be giving them back their lives. It would be like the beast-men. Like Father. . . .”

  Montgomery slammed his hand against the hearth loud enough to rattle the hanging portraits. “Your father?” Something dark crossed his face. “I thought you were done trying to be like your father. It’s your mother you should aspire toward. She never would have done such an ungodly thing. She wouldn’t have brought Edward back, and she certainly wouldn’t be talking about creating an undead army.”

  I threw up my hands. “Maybe I’m not like her! You’ve been trying to steer my future toward her, but I can’t help what I am. It’s always been inevitable, don’t you see? Father’s inheritance is stronger. I’ve never had a choice, not really. It’s in my blood. I can’t fight who I am.”

  “You don’t even know who you are!”

  His hand dug into the wooden mantel above the fire so hard that his knuckles went white. I froze, surprised by his words. He stopped, too. Regret crossed his face and he turned away, but not before I saw panic there, too.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  I could tell by the set of his mouth that he was about to dismiss his words as nonsense fueled by anger. But then he looked at me—really looked at me, and something broke in his face. “It’s never going to stop, is it?” he said more to himself than to me. “You think you’re fated to be like him. You think it’s genetics and prophecy both.” He cursed softly under his breath.

  Worry started to pull at me. “Montgomery . . .”

  “I never wanted to tell you this, Juliet. I’ve tried so hard to protect you from the truth.”

  I forgot about Radcliffe, and the servants, and my plans to reanimate an army of dead, as a thousand little claws of fear dug into me. It felt just like that terrible day on the island when I had opened Father’s files and found my own name written there, among his other creations all named after Shakespearean characters: Balthazar, Ajax, Cymbeline, Juliet.

  Ask him about your father’s laboratory files on the island, the Beast had said. About the ones you didn’t see.

  I shook my head a little too hard. “If you’re trying to say I’m one of Father’s creations, I don’t believe it. He gave me a few organs from a deer, that’s all. I’m human.”

  Montgomery’s face softened. “I know that.” His voice was so gentle that I knew that whatever he would say next was going to break my heart. “You’re right—you aren’t one of his creations. You were born to your mother, just as he said. The only difference is . . .” He swallowed, slow and reluctantly. “He isn’t your father.”

  The flames in the fireplace stopped. The drafts ruffling the tapestries froze. The entire world ceased in its orbit for the space of just a few words.

  “What did you say?” I whispered.

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  THIRTY-FIVE

  “HENRI MOREAU ISN’T YOUR father,” Montgomery said, more emphatically. “I’ve known it since we were little. He kept the paper records locked away, even on the island. He told me himself once, after you’d tried to sneak into his laboratory on Belgrave Square. That’s why he never wanted to teach you his research, Juliet—not because you were female, but because you weren’t his.”

  I pressed a hand to my head. “That’s impossible.”

  “He raised you as his own. He could have left you and your mother, but he didn’t.”

  I leaned against the wall with the feeling that my blood was moving in fits and starts through my veins. Moreau blood. It had always been his blood in my veins, guiding me, leading me. Hadn’t it?

  “I don’t understand,” I stammered.

  “Your mother had an affair.” His words came like a crash of thunder. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but your mother wasn’t the pious woman you thought she was. She had affairs since long before you were born, many with the same men she later went on to be a mistress to—”

  “No!” I slapped my hands over my ears. It was difficult enough to process that my father wasn’t really my father, but that my mother wasn’t the pious woman I remembered? “That’s not true. You’re the one who keeps reminding me what a good woman she was!”

  His open hands pleaded with me. “Your father didn’t want you to know the truth. He was afraid you’d turn out like her, so he lied about the type of woman she was, and I did the same, but he changed his mind after you’d arrived on the island. He thought you were old enough to know the truth, so he wrote you a letter I was to give you on the return voyage back to London. He kept the letter in a file in a locked section of his laboratory along with other records that proved your mother’s transgressions.”

  The burned letter.

  “The Beast saw you,” I said. “He told me you set fire to a letter meant for me, along with secret files you were trying to keep hidden. I didn’t know if I could believe him or not, but he wasn’t lying, was he?”

  Montgomery looked very pale. “No. He wasn’t lying.”

  “But why would you burn them?” Anger started to flood my veins. “That’s the truth—my truth! You had no right!”

  “I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “I thought if you believed your mother was good, then you might want to be like her and less like your father. All this obsession over being like him, inheriting his madness . . . I wanted you to think there was another option. Even if that other option was a lie.” He clenched his jaw. “I grew up without a father. It’s terrible not knowing a thing about who you come from. I didn’t want you to suffer the same way.”

  “It’s worse to believe the wrong man is one’s father!”

  He looked down at his hands. “Is it? I don’t know anymore. Now I see I shouldn’t have lied to you, but it frightened me when you kept insisting you had no choice but to be like Henri Moreau, when you weren’t even his child.”

  I stared at him. Upstairs the staff was waiting for us, Edward was reacquainting himself with life, and I couldn’t bear to think about anything other than my parents.

  “Then who is my father?” I asked.

  Montgomery blinked, like the question had never occurred to him. I continued, “You said there were files on my mother’s transgressions. You must have read them. It must have said who my true father is, before you burned it all.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t read the files. There was talk once about a French diplomat who died years ago. Whoever he was, it doesn’t matter. No one of consequence.”

  I stared at him, feeling like a glass left too long on a burner, heating and glowing and so very, very close to the point of shattering.

  He had destroyed any chance I had of knowing my true parentage.

  I went to the front door, throwing it open so I could gulp fresh air and let the dark night shroud me. The blood in my veins belonged to a stranger I’d never met. The wedding ring on my finger tied me to a liar.

  I had been so afraid of revealing my secrets to him; perhaps I should have feared more what he was hiding from me.

  I closed my eyes, feeling my whole body shake. Montgomery called my name but I tore outside, down the front step into the night, through the mud and the darkness away from Montgomery, away from the truth, away from the fact that he had lied to me.

  I wasn’t Henri Moreau’s daughter. I wasn’t a Moreau at all.

  And if I wasn’t that, what was I?

  WITH A MOONLESS SKY, the entire world looked
black. I crashed through the soggy muck away from the road and the manor and the servants depending on me. I didn’t want to be found, not now. How could I be found, when my soul was this lost?

  My thoughts moved faster than my steps, and I barely paid attention to where I was going. For my entire life, society had defined me by my father—and so had I. I’d blamed all my faults on him: my unnatural curiosity and my inclination toward experimentation and even how easily I was able to kill. I’d also thought of him as my source of strength. All those desperate nights I’d comforted myself with my father’s brilliance and determination. I’d structured my entire world around a man who was both a madman and a genius because I thought his spirit lived in my blood.

  But I was wrong.

  I closed my eyes, collapsing against the skeleton of a tree. I stared at my hands in the moonlight, flexing them, feeling as if I didn’t recognize the lines of my own palm. There was no fate there. No fortune. All Jack Serra had read was the desperation in my own face.

  The tree’s bark scraped against my back, but I felt nothing. Memories of my mother looked different now: she had always clutched a Bible, so I’d assumed she was pious. Now that I thought back, was she a good person? All those times she came back from church sweaty and flushed, I’d assumed she’d been praying fervently, but it seemed so evident now she’d been with a lover instead. Or those days she was gone knitting socks for the inmates at Bryson Prison. I had never seen her knit at home, not even once. Did she even know how to knit?

  Had every memory I had of her been a lie?

  I sank into the mud, hugging my knees in tight. I wished I could disappear into the tree, into the soil, into the dark night, until there was nothing of me left. The bog had tried to swallow me once. Maybe I’d made a mistake in not letting it.

  A branch snapped and my head jerked up, breath frozen. In my desolation I hadn’t thought about the foxes out here on the moors, winter-starved and used to the taste of human flesh from Elizabeth’s thrown-out experimentations. Now that the rains were gone, they’d be coming out of hiding, just like Radcliffe.

  He might be in Quick even now, stopped only by a flooded road, hunting us like some famished animal. The household of Ballentyne was resting all its hopes on me.

  The branch snapped again, and I bristled. I reached for a fallen limb, tearing off one branch to form a sharp end. Fear clawed at the soft parts of my throat as movement caught my eye in the darkness, and I clutched the branch harder.

  Out of the gloom the creature came at me on fast little legs, and I let myself relax. Those short legs and black snout didn’t belong to a fox.

  “Sharkey,” I said, as my little dog ran up to me. I pulled him close, burying my nose in his fur, breathing in that earthy smell I so loved. More footsteps came and another figure loomed in the darkness, this one much too large for a fox, even too large for a man.

  “Balthazar, what are you doing out here?” I asked as he entered the clearing and Sharkey ran over to nuzzle his leg.

  “Looking for you, Miss. Montgomery said you’d run away. Everyone’s out searching for you.”

  He stopped a few feet away, tapped the ground with a foot until he’d found a dry patch, and sat cross-legged across from me. In the darkness he was little more than a voice and a smell of tweed and wet dog, though I knew that with his sight, he could see me perfectly.

  I wiped the wet from my eyes. “I can’t go back there. I don’t belong there.”

  “You’re mistress of Ballentyne.”

  I barked a cruel laugh. “Elizabeth and the professor only made me their heir because they thought I was my father’s daughter. It turns out they were as wrong as I was.” I pulled my knees closer. “Did you know?”

  “That the doctor wasn’t your father? Yes, Miss. I knew from the beginning. You didn’t smell like him.”

  Father’s smell came back to me, formaldehyde and apricot preserves, but I knew Balthazar spoke of a deeper smell. The scent of family. Henri Moreau must have instructed Balthazar never to tell me the truth, taking advantage of his unwavering obedience just as I had.

  “I’m not a Moreau,” I said, testing out the words. “I’m a . . . Chastain, I suppose,” I said, thinking of my mother’s maiden name. “Or rather a James, since I married Montgomery.”

  So many names, and none of them felt right. They didn’t have the right number of syllables or the right feel in my mouth. None of them were Moreau.

  “It’s useless.” My voice broke. “I was so certain I knew who I was and who I was supposed to be. I’m not certain of anything now.”

  My running nose was the only sound in the night, save distant moisture dripping from branches and the wind in the moors. Balthazar’s joints creaked as he shifted.

  “You’re Juliet,” he said simply.

  I looked up at him helplessly. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Then you’ll find out.”

  I found myself staring at the dark space where his voice came from. One thing I’d learned about Balthazar was that even though he was created by my father, he wasn’t bound by him. He’d gone from idolizing the man as a god to forming his own thoughts and beliefs and identity. How had a creature made of bits of a dog and a bear already learned so much more about life than I had?

  Tears started coming harder. Big, thick ones. Balthazar shuffled closer and wrapped an arm around me, patting me gently. Sharkey nuzzled his snout against my arm. Sitting in the dark forest, I still felt lost, but now there was a light to move slowly toward.

  As I squinted, I realized the light wasn’t just in my head. It moved through the trees, far off, but silently. My body went rigid as I turned to Balthazar.

  “Someone’s coming,” I whispered.

  I pictured Elizabeth’s ghost walking through these bogs, just as she had when I’d nearly drowned with that sheep. How I wish she were here now to guide me, as she had then.

  Sharkey barked as the light grew closer. I made out Montgomery’s guilt-ridden face reflected in the light as he followed the sound of our voices to the clearing. He stopped at the edge.

  “Juliet, thank God. I’m sorry.”

  I wiped the last of the moisture from my eyes. Sharkey nudged himself closer, and I scratched his head hard as he liked, hoping it would calm me, too.

  “You should have told me the truth,” I said quietly. I stood, holding Sharkey tightly in my arms. “I’m not that same little girl you used to shelter from the bad things in the world, Montgomery. I’m grown, and I might make mistakes, but I’m capable of taking care of myself—and Ballentyne.” I took a deep breath full of the highland mist and looked in the direction of the lights of the house, hoping that was true.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Montgomery said. “Radcliffe won’t take Ballentyne.”

  I squinted toward the house, feeling the cold mist spread over me, listening to the sound of the dripping bogs. “I might have an idea how,” I said hesitantly, letting the idea grow, and reached down to cup a handful of water from the closest puddle. “It has to do with Jack Serra flooding the moors.”

  Montgomery tensed. “You mean to drown Radcliffe and his men?”

  I knew he wouldn’t like the idea of more bloodshed. Violence wasn’t in his nature, but he’d slaughtered the beast-men when he’d been given no choice. We had no choice now, either. I would try to reason with Radcliffe, but if that didn’t work, there was no way I was letting him harm a single one of those girls.

  I shook my head. “We’re going to electrocute them.”

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  THIRTY-SIX

  ON THE WALK BACK to Ballentyne I explained my idea.

  “Jack Serra—Ajax—flooded the road when he broke the levees to slow down Radcliffe. It flooded the manor’s courtyard as well. There must be three inches of water soaking the gravel, deeper in places. The entire manor�
��s wired with electricity. If we can trap Radcliffe and his men in the flooded courtyard and introduce an electric current, it would electrocute anyone touching the water.”

  For a few moments, Montgomery said nothing. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my plan, or if his silence came from disapproval. “That’s true,” he said at last. “But I think we owe it to Lucy to reason with him first. If we try to negotiate and he is still bent on bringing us harm, then I suppose we haven’t many other choices. The problem is that someone would have to connect a metal line to carry the current. That person would be electrocuted, too. It’s suicide.”

  I hesitated. “For a normal person, yes. Not for someone who can’t die.”

  Ballentyne blazed in the distance, reflecting in Montgomery’s eyes. “You mean Edward.”

  “Exactly. Elizabeth said the reanimated can’t be killed unless their bodies are destroyed beyond repair, like how Hensley burned to death. A simple electric shock wouldn’t hurt Edward any more than the tree branch harmed Hensley. He might need a few small repairs, but he wouldn’t die.” I paused. “At least, I don’t think he would.”

  “Is this why you brought him back? Because he’s useful to you?”

  I stopped in the road, and Montgomery stopped as well, as Balthazar and Sharkey trailed up ahead toward the flooded courtyard. I lowered my voice.

  “You make me sound as ruthless as Henri Moreau. I didn’t bring Edward back to serve some purpose. He’s a person. A friend. I brought him back because he had been wronged, and I had the power to help him. If you died, I’d bring you back as well. Not because I wanted to use you, but because I loved you.”