“Lot of bodies, Miss,” he grunted. “I’d best get started on the graves; the ground is frozen, so I’ll have to sink them in the bog.”
“I’ll help you.”
He shook his head. “You inhaled a lot of smoke, Miss. You need rest as well. Edward can help; he’s strong, even now.” He lumbered off.
I faced Ballentyne, watching the smoke rise. The roof of the southern tower had caved in, but the stone bones still stood sentry over the moors. I thought of the winding steps that led to the secrets those rooms once held: Hensley’s room with the cages of rats, and above it, the laboratory. All of it now reduced to ashes.
Just like Lucy.
“Parts of the house have burned before,” McKenna said, standing beside me. “When my mother was a girl a fire started in the southern tower and took the entire wing. There’ll be demolition to do, plenty of wreckage and cleaning, but the walls have stood for hundreds of years, and look—they’re still standing. We’ll rebuild. In a few years it’ll be good as new. We can wire electric lights properly, as Elizabeth always wanted. And we can expand the servants’ rooms to bring more girls here. So many of them have nowhere else to go, you know. It’ll be grand.” She clasped her hands. I stared at the wreckage. Whatever lofty vision she saw there, I saw only ashes and smoke.
At my silence, she wrung her hands. “Of course, you’re the mistress now. It’s entirely your decision how we rebuild. I’d be grateful to offer some advice, just because I’ve spent my whole life here. Was born in the guest room on the second floor, as a matter of fact. And my mother before me, and her father. This is my home, Mistress, but it’s your estate. You let me know your plans, and I’ll see them carried out.”
I squinted at the manor, trying to see the potential there. Elizabeth had entrusted this all to me, along with the secrets the walls held. Ballentyne had been her dream—but was it mine?
“No,” I whispered.
McKenna’s eyes went wide. “You don’t want to rebuild? But Mistress, surely you understand—it’s useless as ruins. . . .”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said gently. “I mean I don’t want to rebuild. Ballentyne has never been my home, not like it was Elizabeth’s, and not like it’s yours. You should rebuild it, McKenna. I’d like to give it to you. The building—what’s left of it—the land, responsibility for the staff.”
She stared at me like I was speaking some foreign language, and then shook her head emphatically. “I couldn’t. Not in a thousand years.”
“Why not? Elizabeth told me you knew this place better than she did. She said she couldn’t run it without you.”
“But it isn’t my inheritance,” she pressed. “My family’s always been the caretakers. The von Stein family has always owned it. It’s passed down from generation to generation. I’m not of that family. You are. You’re related by blood.” She wrung her hands harder. My offer had truly troubled her.
“Sometimes inheritance has nothing to do with blood. It’s about what’s best for Ballentyne, and that’s you.”
She gaped at me. “Are you certain, Miss?”
I thought of Jack Serra, flipping his fortune-telling cards in the light of a lantern, talking to me about finding my fate. I pressed a hand against the charm around my neck. I didn’t know what my fate was now, but I knew Ballentyne wasn’t it.
“I am.” I smiled, looking at the building. Now I was starting to see how it could thrive again, but under McKenna’s care. “But first, I need to say my good-byes.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
FORTY-ONE
THE RUINS WERE SURROUNDED by a deep quiet. Most of the stone walls still stood, giving the manor its iconic shape. I imagined that from a distance a traveler wouldn’t even know it was ruined. It wouldn’t be until he came closer and saw the sunlight glinting through gaps in the stone that he’d realize it was only a shell.
Elizabeth. Hensley. Lucy. I wasn’t sure I believed in the ideas of souls, but if they did exist, I was glad they had such a place to wander.
I traced my fingers along the walls as I entered the gaping hole that had once been the thick front door. Not but a few weeks ago I was knocking on it, desperate for refuge. Had I brought about its destruction the minute I set foot here?
No, I thought as I stepped through the foyer. The science within these halls was never meant to exist.
The ancient tapestries had burned, revealing the entrance to the secret passageways. The passages seemed less mysterious with the light of day pouring through the roofless ceiling. I stepped inside, heedless of the soot staining my dress. The rubble shifted and a little pink nose poked out. One of Hensley’s white rats, alive and well except for a small burned patch on its tail. I knelt down.
“Come here, little fellow.” I held out my hand as Hensley and Elizabeth used to do. But the rat shied away, sensing that I wasn’t one of its masters. I didn’t mind. I liked thinking that some of the rats had survived the fire. Life still thrived in Ballentyne, even in ruins. Something still remembered Hensley and Elizabeth.
I followed the passageway slowly, having to climb over fallen beams and collapsed walls. McKenna had quite a task ahead of her, but I was confident she’d succeed. I liked thinking of Ballentyne as a sanctuary for girls who didn’t have anywhere else to go. When I’d been alone and on my own, I would have loved calling this place home.
But it wasn’t my home, not really. Neither was London, which was the site of so much loss, the place where the professor had died and where scandal had befallen my family, and where Lucy’s mother waited for a daughter and a husband who would never return.
I closed my eyes, resting my fingers on the walls. When the wind blew, I thought I could smell a little of Lucy’s perfume, and it made me miss her all the more.
Was it fair that I survived, and she didn’t?
If Lucy hadn’t died, I imagine she’d have lived out the rest of her life here, taking care of the girls. Her father was wrong when he said she only cared for dresses and handsome men. She’d loved the girls, and she’d loved me, and she’d loved Edward. She’d cared about us enough to sacrifice her own life for us.
I left the passages and climbed the central staircase up to the ruins of the northern tower. The glass window of the observatory had shattered, littering the charred floor. All that was left of Elizabeth’s settee was a broken frame. I remembered her leaning in, face a mirror to my own, telling me the story of Victor Frankenstein.
I kicked aside some charred furniture until I found her metal globe of the constellations. The wooden stand had burned and the metal was dented, but mostly intact. I ran my fingers along the top portion, where Elizabeth had kept Les Étoiles gin.
I opened the secret latch of the globe, but the bottles had shattered and melted. Ruined, like everything else. Then my fingers drifted to the bottom compartment where she’d stored Ballentyne’s secrets.
I glanced over my shoulder, listening for the sounds of footsteps or breathing that would tell me I wasn’t alone. But all the paintings and tapestries that hid the secret passages were gone now. I could see everything, even straight to the morning sky. I was alone.
I slid open the compartment, breath drawn. Ashes rained out; thick black ones that stained my fingers. They still had the shape of books until I touched them, and they broke apart into dust.
All of Frankenstein’s legacy, the Origin Journals, had been destroyed.
I looked at my soot-dark hands. These ashes had been ideas once; they’d given birth to my own father’s research, which had given life to Balthazar, and Edward, and even to me.
Even days ago, such a loss might have filled me with melancholy. I knew Henri Moreau’s work was wrong, but I’d come to believe in its potential. Now that I knew he wasn’t my father, and his genius and madness didn’t flow in my veins, the journals seemed distant, like something that belonged
to someone else. I let the ashes fall through my fingertips.
The last thing I felt was sadness. In fact, I’d never felt so alive.
I stood up, dusting my hands off, and left the observatory without looking back. A shattered window in the hallway gave me a glimpse of Edward and Balthazar in the courtyard, loading the mercenaries’ bodies onto a pallet to drag out to the bog. I could still remember how close I was to death that day I nearly drowned with the sheep.
I had escaped those frigid waters. Radcliffe and his men never would.
I spent the rest of the morning checking the rest of the rooms, finding little to salvage save a few pieces of jewelry and coins that had survived in a lockbox in Elizabeth’s bedroom that we could use to pay for the inn in Quick and food and transportation. It wasn’t until afternoon, when Balthazar and Edward were almost finished with the last of the bodies, that I steeled my strength and went to the southern tower.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs, tracing the crumbled walls. A small line of smoke still drifted out of some pile of rubble, off to the heavens. I took a deep breath and climbed to the laboratory.
The roof was gone, letting light touch every corner. The wooden operating table was only ash. A few glass jars remained, but I threw them out the window, letting them shatter in the rubble below.
I knelt by the floor, where the metal bits of a corset mixed with white pieces of bone. This is where I had left Lucy’s body, where I’d decided that she wouldn’t have another chance at life. I found a metal pan and gathered her bones carefully, wrapped them in my own shawl.
This isn’t good-bye, she had said to me before I left for the island. I’ll see you again.
I whispered the same to her, telling her that I’d follow her when it was my time. Amid the ashes something metal flashed, and I brushed aside rubble to find Edward’s pocket watch, which Lucy had worn around her neck the entire time he’d been dead.
I slid the watch into my pocket. It was time to bury Lucy and leave this place forever.
I took a step back toward the stairs but hesitated, recognizing my own boot print in the ash. It was small, like Elizabeth’s, and yet the steps were tight and determined, like Henri Moreau’s had been.
I wouldn’t follow in Father’s footsteps anymore.
I wouldn’t follow in Elizabeth’s, either.
I walked through the ash. The only footsteps I’d make would be my own.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
FORTY-TWO
MY LAST VIEW OF Ballentyne was with the sun behind it, the moors in the wind, as I scattered Lucy’s ashes in the bog where Edward and Balthazar had buried her father.
“I’ll miss you, Lucy,” I whispered. “You never gave up on me, or on Edward, or even on your father. We were lucky to have called you a friend.”
Balthazar stood solemnly a few steps away, blinking into the fading sun with his Bible folded in his hands, Edward by his side and Sharkey at his feet. At my nod Balthazar opened the pages and read from one of his favorite passages.
“A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of birth,” he read, and then closed the Bible. “Miss Lucy was special to me,” he added. “She was like a beam of light on the wall you couldn’t catch. She never thought about the shadows. I tried to look after her.” He took a deep breath. “God will look after her now.”
While he said his good-byes to Lucy, I drew the pocket watch out of my apron and pressed it into Edward’s hand. He looked at me in surprise.
“She would have wanted you to have it,” I said. “She kept it with her to remember you by. I thought it might remind you of her.”
“It shall.” He slipped it into the shirt pocket over his heart, pressing it once to feel its weight against his chest.
When the three of us had said our good-byes to her, I gathered a handful of heather and tied it with a ribbon, and left it on the corner of the field. We made our way down the muddy road, past the oak tree with the lightning scar down the trunk. It was strange to think of Ballentyne empty now, with Carlyle and McKenna and the servants already in Quick. McKenna said the monastery had some spare rooms they could stay in until Ballentyne was livable again, in exchange for help around the monks’ farm. Life was already finding its new path for them.
But would it for us?
Montgomery was lying in a bed in Quick, waiting for me. I toyed with my wedding ring, thinking of our future together. The world was ours, now. No fates or inheritances to bind us. No more shadows, no more lurking threats. Maybe Montgomery and I would travel. He knew how to sail, and I’d love to see the lights of Paris. Maybe we’d go to America, where the great redwoods towered. Or maybe we’d settle in Quick, in a little cottage on the edge of town and take up Elizabeth’s role as healer of small things: broken bones, gout, indigestion.
Balthazar paused, looking back down the road in the direction of the manor.
“What is it, Balthazar?”
“Something I forgot to do,” he said, shuffling a bit. He cast a worried expression back over his shoulder. “I must go back. Not for long. You don’t need to wait for me.”
I rested my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll see you in Quick tonight?”
He nodded, distracted, and shuffled back down the road at a surprising clip. Sharkey followed at his heels, eternally loyal.
“What do you think that’s about?” I asked Edward.
“Who knows,” he said. “The man is entitled to his mysteries.”
We kept walking as the sun sank lower and the twilight shadows darkened the forest. Ahead, the lights of Quick winked. Another mile and I’d be back with Montgomery.
But it wasn’t just Montgomery and me, and the longer Edward and I walked without speaking, the greater that silence became. I cast him a sidelong look, wondering what was going through his head. He had another chance at life now—but without Lucy.
“What will you do now, Edward?” My voice was the kind of quiet saved only for the really important questions in life. “I don’t know what Montgomery and I will do, or where we’ll go. I think Balthazar will always be with us regardless of where we end up. You’re welcome to stay with us, too. You know that, don’t you?”
He rubbed the back of his head. He might have been nearly indestructible, but the bloodstain and hole on his shirt were impossible to ignore.
“I’m grateful, I truly am, but we both know my future isn’t with you and Montgomery. Nor with Balthazar.” The conversation fell back into a thoughtful silence as we continued toward Quick. “I never told you this,” he continued, “but Hensley showed me the secret passages.”
“He did?”
“He was suspicious of me, but intrigued to have someone else like himself. I don’t think anyone truly realized how lonely that child was. Not just because he was the only little boy in a house of women, but because life is different when you’re like we are. Everything’s the same, and yet it’s as though you’re looking at the world from a distance through a spyglass. It can make a person feel very removed from everyone else.” His fingers drifted up to touch the pocket watch in his shirt. “He told me a story about the original residents of Ballentyne.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Victor Frankenstein?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t Frankenstein I was interested in. It was his creation. The fate of the monster he made.”
“It wasn’t a monster,” I objected.
Edward shrugged. “Call it whatever you like. The truth is, I’m not so different from him. Created from bits and pieces of man and animal. Brought to life by a madman. Like him, I know what death feels like. How many people can say that?” He looked off to the horizon, where the first buildings of Quick were just visible. “I think with Hensley gone, there must only be me and him in the entire world.”
He stopped and wiped his forehead, though there was no sweat on the
cold night. I heard a dog barking—the rest of the world was just a few steps away, but I felt caught here on the road between my old life and my future one.
“I’m going to go after him,” Edward said. “To the Arctic. He went there because he didn’t belong in the realm of men. I feel it, too. I wanted to be human for so long, but that’s not what I am. I never have been. It’s time I accepted that. It occurs to me that Frankenstein’s creation and I, well, we could both use a companion.”
I tore my eyes away from the lights of Quick. “That was over a hundred years ago. He might not still exist.”
Edward shrugged. “I’d like an adventure.”
The dog barked again, closer now, amid the sounds of a door slamming and a couple arguing and the realities of the real world. Edward gave me a smile. “Come on. Montgomery’s waiting for us.”
MONTGOMERY DIDN’T WAKE UNTIL the morning. I’d spent the night slumped in a chair by his bedside. There was something strange about watching him sleeping. When I still suffered from my illness, it had been me so many times in bed for days with a raging fever. Our roles were reversed now—Montgomery ill and me sitting by his bedside, praying for him to wake safe and sound.
“Juliet.”
I jerked awake, disoriented by the sunlight pouring through the window. Montgomery was sitting up in bed, dark circles under his eyes and deep lines in his face.
“Montgomery!” I pushed out of the stiff chair and climbed onto the bed, feeling his forehead, trying to count the pulse on his wrist, but he brushed off my attempts with a laugh.
“I’m fine,” he said, though his voice was gravelly with exhaustion.
“You’ve been asleep for a full day,” I said.
He took my hands in his, kissing the palm of each one. “You’re safe, and that’s all that matters.” He squinted around the room. “Where are we?”
“The guest rooms above the tavern in Quick.”
“What happened at Ballentyne?”
A Cold Legacy Page 29